Degree Name

EdD (Doctor of Education)

Program

Educational Leadership

Date of Award

November 1988

Abstract

The problem of this study was to determine the level of concern of supervisors and administrators in the state of Tennessee toward mainstreaming classes for the severely mentally retarded and the classes for the multi-handicapped into the regular schools. The Change Facilitators Stages of Concern Questionnaire (CFSoCQ) was the instrument selected as appropriate for the study. Permission was obtained from Dr. Gene Hall at the University of Florida to reproduce and administer the CFSoCQ. A stratified random sample was conducted as representative of the total population of superintendents, special education supervisors, special day school principals, high school principals, middle school principals, and elementary school principals in the state of Tennessee. A demographic data sheet and the CFSoCQ were mailed to 824 selected educators. A 21% return was obtained. The data sheet asked for the sex, current position in education, number of years in education, area of certification, last degree received, whether their system had a special day school, and whether their school had a class for either severely mentally retarded or multi-handicapped students. If they did have either a class for severely mentally retarded or a class for multi-handicapped, they were asked to also answer 15 additional questions concerning the class and its students. Twenty null hypotheses and 22 research questions were tested at the.05 level of significance, using a two-tailed test. The t test for independent samples was used to test for significance among the groups. The analysis of variance was used to test for significant differences between groups. The Newman-Keuls Procedure was selected to show where the significant difference existed. Two hypotheses were rejected. Major findings revealed that special education supervisors are aware of the need to mainstream classes for the severely mentally retarded and classes for the multi-handicapped into the regular schools.

Document Type

Dissertation - unrestricted

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