The Social and Academic Impacts on Children with Disabilities who are Receiving Inclusion in Schools - Essay Example

One of the initiatives of the No Child Left Behind initiative, as well as other educational initiatives that have been mooted in recent times, is to include children with disabilities into integrated classrooms, together with normal children. The Individuals with Disabilities Act of 1990 was passed to guarantee equal access to education for children with disabilities. (Motwani, 2007). While the move towards inclusion is a recent trend, the debate on the merits and demerits of educational inclusion have been continuing for decades.

This study proposes to undertake a literature review on inclusion in schools and to examine the ramifications of inclusion for disabled children, in order to assess its relative efficacy. This study is purely a literature review and will not support its findings with empirical data gleaned from individual participants. The focus of this research effort is to gain a general idea of the relative merits and demerits of inclusion and its potential or the lack thereof, in affecting the well being and successful integration of disabled students.

Since the incidence of disability among students is becoming more widespread, this study is important because it examines one aspect of educational reform that could be effectively used for the benefit of these students, in order to integrate them as productive members of society. The lack of empirical support for this study is one of its limitations. Moreover, this study confines itself to studies that have been carried out after the period of 1996, although some prior material is also examined.

The focus of this research effort is on the current findings in the literature and how best it can demonstrate the progress sand efficacy of inclusion. The findings in this study support the conclusion that there is a greater amount of research required into the merits and demerits of inclusion, in terms of ethnographic studies on disabled students. However, the literature review does