Page 179 - RUICHSS 2023 Proceeding

University of Ruhuna ISSN: 2706-0063
Matara, Sri Lanka

Teachers estimate that students with disabilities achieve statistically

significant lower level of inclusion in comparation with their peers without
disabilities (Table 2). It was found that students with disabilities achieve

significantly lower results on the subscales of emotional inclusion, social

inclusion, and academic self-concept.

Results of this research are in accordance with previous studies of Alnahdi et

al. (2022) and Pozas et al. (2021) whose results indicated that for all three
dimensions (emotional well-being, social inclusion, and academic self-

concept) students with SEN scored lower levels of inclusion compared to their
peers without SEN.

The determined lower emotional well-being of students with developmental

disabilities indicates that, according to the teacher's assessment, they like
school less than students without disabilities, which confirms the results of

previous research (Alnahdi et al., 2022, Pozas et al., 2021; McCoy & Banks,
2012; Skrzypiec et al., 2016). Bearing in mind the importance of the teacher-

student relationship for emotional well-being (Lavy and Naama-Ghanayim,

2020), it is possible that the insufficient education of teachers for inclusive
education and the insufficient support of special education professionals

(Bišćević et al., 2017) are related with a possible distance in the relationship
between students with disabilities and their teachers, that is, less care and

attention of teachers about the emotional well-being of students with

disabilities compared to students without disabilities. Further research is
needed to gain a clearer insight into this possible connection. Furthermore,

previous research has established a significant connection between students'
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