The effectiveness of the buddy support system on teacher-parent collaboration and students’ social interaction in special education in Malaysia / Donnie Adams Paramasivam
This research examined the effectiveness of the buddy support system on teacher parent collaboration and students’ social interaction in special education in Malaysia. Until recently, there has been growing awareness of the powerful influence a peer group can have in supporting inclusion. The stu...
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Format: | Thesis |
Published: |
2016
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Online Access: | http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/6568/4/donnie.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/6568/ |
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Summary: | This research examined the effectiveness of the buddy support system on teacher parent
collaboration and students’ social interaction in special education in Malaysia. Until
recently, there has been growing awareness of the powerful influence a peer group can
have in supporting inclusion. The study will explore teachers’ and parents’ understanding
of special educational practices, their willingness to communicate with each other, their
perceived roles as well as their expectations of each other in which these elements were
deemed vital in a collaboration process that encourages students’ social interaction while
the effectiveness of the Buddy Support System as a moderator is investigated in this
collaboration process. This study adopted a sequential mixed method design, where
quantitative data was collected using teachers’ and parents’ questionnaires which
highlights the elements and importance of collaboration for a successful special education
programme, the elements of friendship, interactions, acceptance by classmates, the
importance of social interaction of young students with special needs, and the elements
of the effectiveness of the buddy support system. Two types of statistical techniques were
used to analyze the quantitative data. Descriptive statistics comprising mean and standard
deviation were used to analyze data relating to the domains of teacher-parent
collaboration, students’ social interaction among SEN and mainstream pupils and the
effectiveness of the buddy support system as perceived by teachers and parents.
Inferential statistics comprising Pearson's R Correlation was used to analyze the
relationship between teacher-parent collaboration and students’ social interaction as
perceived by the teachers and parents. PROCESS procedure for SPSS (Hayes, 2013) was
used to determine whether the buddy support system significantly moderates the
relationship between teacher-parent collaboration and students’ social interaction in the
implementation of special educational practices. Results showed that the teachers rated
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themselves highest on the understanding about SEN while parents rated themselves
highest on the expectations of teachers’ role in the implementation of SEN. Both teachers
and parents rated the acceptance by classmates domain the highest in students’ social
interaction among SEN and mainstream pupils. Teachers rated the influence and benefit
domain of the buddy support system the highest while parents rated highest on the
influence domain of the buddy support system. Hierarchical multiple linear regression
results were able to confirm that by controlling the Buddy Support System variables
(moderators), teacher-parent collaboration domain did not significantly predict the
students’ social interaction domains, which accounted for a significant proportion of the
variance in students’ social interaction. Emerging themes from the qualitative data
supports the quantitative data results. The findings of this study will provide essential
guidelines for fostering effective buddy support system on teacher-parent collaboration
in special educational practices. Training and support could be further provided by MOE
to aid the goal towards 75% of students with special needs enrolled in inclusive programs
by 2025. |
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