Teacher Interactions with Mainstreamed Handicapped Students and Their Nonhandicapped Peers

Hammill Institute on Disabilities

Teacher Interactions with Mainstreamed Handicapped Students and Their NonhandicappedPeersAuthor(s): Alda J. Alves and Jay GottliebSource: Learning Disability Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Winter, 1986), pp. 77-83Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1510404 .

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TEACHER INTERACTIONS WITH MAINSTREAMED HANDICAPPED

STUDENTS AND THEIR NONHANDICAPPED PEERS

Alda J. Alves and Jay Gottlieb

Abstract. Teacher interactions with handicapped and nonhandicapped students in 38 mainstreamed classrooms were observed using an interval time-sampling procedure and behavioral categories derived from the Brophy-Good Teacher-Child Dyadic Interaction System. Six aspects of teacher-student interactions were considered: Academic Questions, Extended Feedback, Praise, Criticism, Work In- teractions, and Total Amount of Interactions. Results of discriminant analysis indicated that handicapped students received fewer questions and were provided with less teacher feedback than their nonhandicapped peers. It was concluded, therefore, that mainstreamed handicapped students were less involved in academic exchanges than the nonhandicapped subjects.

In the past decade, a number of naturalistic studies have focused on teachers' classroom interactions with high- and low-achieving students. In 13 out of 20 studies reviewed to assess the frequency of teacher-student academic interactions, teachers were found to interact more with high than with low achievers; in the remaining seven studies, no differences were found in the total frequency of such interactions (Brophy & Good, 1974), however.

In addition to differences in the total number of interactions, research has also shown that teachers exhibit different behavior patterns towards students perceived as either high and low achievers (lows). Good (1980) and Brophy (1982) reviewed the main findings of 20 studies of teacher-student interactions, concluding that teachers often: (a) seat lows farther from the teacher's desk and/or in a group; (b) pay less attention to lows in academic situations; (c) call on lows less often to answer questions; (d) allow less time for lows to answer; (e) give lows the answer or call on someone else, rather than try- ing to improve their response through rephrasing or repeating the question; (f) criticize lows more

frequently for incorrect responses; (g) praise lows less frequently for successful responses; (h) reward inappropriate responses of lows; (i) fail more frequently to provide lows with feedback about their public responses; and (j) provide lows with less accurate and less detailed feedback.

The finding that teachers seem to react favor- ably to low achievers has important implications for the mainstreaming of handicapped students into regular classrooms. Since the passage of Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handi- capped Children Act (1975), increasing num- bers of mildly handicapped children have been mainstreamed. To date, however, the relative effectiveness of mainstreamed settings compared to special class placements remains to be demonstrated. Moreover, past research has been consistently product oriented, with little attention paid to the specific classroom processes

ALDA J. AL VES, Ph.D., is Associate Professor, Psychology, University of Rio de Janeiro. JAY GOTTLIEB, Ph.D., is Professor of Educa- tional Psychology, New York University.

Volume 9, Winter 1986 77



subsumed under the general rubric of main-

streaming (Jones, Gottlieb, Guskin, & Yoshida, 1978; MacMillan & Semmel, 1977).

Thus, even the variables most frequently considered-regular classroom teachers' interaction patterns toward mainstreamed handicapped children, total frequency of interactions, and frequency of praise and criticism-have been ex- plored in only a limited number of studies. Among existing comparisons of the frequency of teacher interactions with handicapped versus nonhandicapped students, some authors reported that teachers interacted more with learning disabled students than with their nondisabled classmates (Chapman, Larsen, & Parker, 1979; Forness & Esveldt, 1975; McKinney, McClure, & Feagans, 1982; Thompson, White, & Mor- gan, 1982), whereas others (Bryan, 1974; Bryan & Wheeler, 1972; Richey & McKinney, 1978) found no differences between the two groups. Results related to the quality of teacher reinforcement of handicapped and nonhandicapped students have also been mixed. For example, studies conducted by Bryan (1974) and Chapman et al. (1979) revealed that learning disabled children received significantly more criticism than their nonhandicapped peers; Thompson et al. (1982), however, reported no differences.

The results related to student-teacher interactions in mainstreamed classrooms are not only inconsistent among themselves, they also seem to contradict, at least in part, those obtained with nonhandicapped low achievers. For example, although low achievers tended to interact less frequently with the teacher than did their high- achieving classmates (Brophy, 1982; Good, 1980), similar research with the handicapped showed that, when differences were found, they favored handicapped students compared to nonhandicapped controls. This discrepancy is particularly intriguing as handicapped students are typically described as being low-achieving and of low social status (Gottlieb, 1981).

Given the inconsistencies in past research findings, the frequency and nature of classroom interactions between regular teachers and mainstreamed handicapped students need further clarification. The present study was aimed at identifying and characterizing teacher dyadic interactions with mainstreamed handicapped students compared to those of nonhandicapped

pupils. The frequency of six aspects of dyadic interactions was considered: Academic Questions, Extended Feedback, Praise, Criticism Addressed to the Student, Work Interactions, and Total Amount of Interactions (regardless of their nature).

METHOD Subjects

The sample included 59 mildly handicapped students (37 boys and 22 girls) attending regular classes and receiving resource room support, their nonhandicapped classmates, and their teachers. The resource room children had been evaluated and diagnosed as handicapped students by the local school districts' Committee for the Handicapped, in accordance with federal and state guidelines. The majority of the handicapped students were from low socioeconomic backgrounds and approximately 60% of the sample participated in their school's free lunch program. As to ethnic composition, 28 were Black, 24 white, and 7 were Hispanic. IQ scores, available for half the sample, ranged between 64 and 126 with a mean of 93. Achievement score data, which were available for the entire sample, are difficult to interpret because New York state law allows handicapped students to take achievement tests under modified cir- cumstances, including having questions read to them and allowing more time. Consequently, these scores are not directly comparable to scores based on normative testing procedures. With test modifications, the sample of children in resource rooms read at a mean .3 grade level below their classmates. Only one handicapped youngster had the lowest reading achievement score in his class.

A total of 38 classes, grades 3 to 6, from 12 schools in Long Beach and New York City districts were observed. Classes varied in (a) size (from 13 to 36 students), (b) number of mainstreamed handicapped students (from 1 to 5), and (c) achievement level. Teachers were predominantly female, varying in age, education, and professional experience. Only the classes of teachers who volunteered to par- ticipate in the study were selected. Procedures

Four graduate students conducted classroom observations over 15 weeks during the second half of the school year. Each class was observed

78 Learning Disability Quarterly



for six 20-minute sessions. Data were recorded according to an interval time-sampling procedure in which the observer watches the subjects for 10 seconds and then, during the following 10-second period, records the responses which occurred in the preceding interval. The behavioral categories used were derived from the coding system developed by Brophy and Good (1970). Of the six variables considered in the present study, three (Praise, Criticism, and Work Interaction) correspond to individual categories described in the Brophy-Good system (Brophy & Good, 1970), while the others (Total Amount of Interactions, Academic Questions, and Extended Feedback) were derived by com- bining two or more categories.

The Total Amount of Interactions (TAI) was defined as the number of time intervals during which the subject interacted with the teacher, regardless of -the specific events involved. Academic Questions (AQ) included both product (factual questions requiring brief answers) and process questions (those which require extended responses -explanations or descriptions of a process). Extended Feedback (EF) com- bined process feedback (lengthy explanation or detailed information about a student response) and rephrase (use of additional questions, repetition of prior questions or clues as a means of giving students another chance to arrive at the correct answer). Process feedback seldom extended beyond two observation intervals, or 30 seconds. Work Interaction (WI) was defined as a private academic interaction involving review of a student's written assignment. Finally, Praise (Pr) and Criticism (Cr) refer to teacher responses indicating approval and disapproval of a student's academic response, respectively.

Interobserver agreement. For each behavioral category, interobserver agreement was computed according to the formula:

Observations of agreement x 100 Percentage agreement =oan

Total number of observations

Observations of agreement for a specific category correspond to the number of intervals on which the observers agreed regarding occurrence of a given category; the total number of observations, on the other hand, refer to number of intervals in which that category was recorded by at least one of the observers, thus including observations of agreement plus observations of

disagreement (Coulter, 1976). The mean percentage of agreement across all variables included in the instrument was 86%, the lowest coeffi- cient being .79. Reliability checks were performed periodically throughout the data collection. Results of these checks, which were intended to control for differential effects of observer prac- tice, fatigue, and/or drift, showed that, overall, the percentage of agreement increased during data collection. Data Analysis

Data were organized for analysis according to the following schema: (a) for each observation session, a composite measure indicating the frequencies of occurrence of each of the six depen- dent variables was computed for each of the 59 target handicapped students; (b) the composite measure for each target child was paired with a similar composite index representing a modal nonhandicapped child; this index was computed by taking, for each session in which the handicapped child was observed, the mean frequency for the nonhandicapped group in each of the behavioral categories; and (c) data correspond- ing to six observation sessions per handicapped subject and an equal amount of observation time for the paired modal nonhandicapped were included in the final analysis. The total frequency in a given category was calculated by counting the number of 10-second intervals during which that specific behavioral response was observed. That is, responses are expressed in time units.

Frequency transformation. Because multiple-response data typically yield skewed distributions, it was necessary to transform frequencies to approximate a multivariate normal distribution. Bock (1975) pointed out that although, in the case of multiple-response data, the choice of transformation is not clearcut, "perhaps the most defensible is the multivariate logistic transformation" (p. 554). Specifically, he recommended the following transformation, which was used in the present study:

Z = In (R + .5)

ijk ijk where In is the natural log and Rijk represents the total number of responses associated with subject i from group j in a category k. The addition of .5 to the frequencies before taking the logarithms is designed to avoid the problem related to attempting to take the natural log of zero frequencies and also to reduce bias in the




estimates (Bock, 1975). Table 1 presents the means and standard

deviations of log-transformed data for handi-

capped and nonhandicapped children on the aspects of teacher-student interactions considered in the present study.

As illustrated a meaningful difference was found in the frequency of Academic Questions addressed by the teacher to each subject group, with the handicapped falling approximately one- half standard deviation below the mean of the nonhandicapped students. The difference in Ex- tended Feedback was roughly one-third standard deviation, indicating that nonhandicapped students were more often provided with that type of feedback. The difference in teacher criticism of the two groups was slightly over one quarter of a standard deviation, whereas the remaining differences represented less than one-

quarter of a standard deviation. For the handicapped group the standard deviations were much larger than those for the nonhandicapped - a result expected as a function of the use of means, rather than individual scores to represent the latter. Although this discrepancy indicates a departure from the assumption of within-group

homogeneity of variances, it has been demonstrated (e.g., Lindquist, 1956, pp. 78-86) that the F test is robust with respect to violations of this assumption.

Discriminant analysis. The data were sub- jected to a discriminant analysis in order to iden- tify the variables which contributed most to discrimination between the handicapped and nonhandicapped groups. Results indicated that the linear combination of the six variables under study accounted for approximately 21% of the variance between handicapped and nonhandicapped students' dyadic interactions with the teacher. Moreover, significant differences were noted between the groups in Academic Ques- tions, Extended Feedback, and Total Amount of Interactions. The direction of these differences indicated that, although the handicapped subjects were found to interact more frequently with the teacher than their nonhandicapped peers, fewer questions were addressed to them, and they received less feedback. Praise, Criticism, and Work Interactions emerged as nonsignificant contributors to the discrimination between the groups.

In order to further clarify the relative contribu-

Table 1

Means and Standard Deviations of Log-Transformed Data for Handicapped and Nonhandicapped Students

Groupa Variable

AQ WI EF Pr Cr TAI

Handicapped X .83 .95 .67 -.05 -.50 2.40

SD 1.14 1.05 1.12 .85 .47 .68

Nonhandicapped X 1.24 1.13 .97 -.11 -.38 2.32

SD .58 .60 .51 .51 .34 .38

Note:. The negative signs are due to the log transformation. AQ = Academic Question; WI = Work Interaction; EF = Extended Feedback; Pr = Praise; Cr = Criticism; TAI = Total Amount of Interactions.

an = 59 in each group.




tions of AQ, EF, and TAI to the group discrimination, the structure coefficients (i.e., each variable's correlations with the discriminant function) associated with each variable were calculated. For parsimony, prior to the computa- tion of the structure coefficients, a second analysis was performed for the purpose of de- leting from the linear composite the variable found to be nonsignificant. The relative magnitude of the structure coefficients revealed that the variable which contributed most heavily to the discrimination between the groups was AQ (-.56), sharing 32% of the variance with the discriminant function, followed by EF (-.42), which shared 17%, whereas TAI (.18) accounted for only 3%. Since meaningfulness rather than statistical significance was the main concern in this study, it was concluded that only Academic Questions and Extended Feedback were the primary contributors to the discrimination between groups.

DISCUSSION Our results indicate that mainstreamed mildly

handicapped students are not equally sharing with their nonhandicapped peers the instruction provided by the regular class teacher. Although it would be naive, and even inappropriate, to ex- pect teachers not to treat handicapped students differently, the concern regarding the extent and specific quality of such differences seems justi- fiable by relating to the essence of instructional integration-a basic component of the concept of rhainstreaming (Kaufman, Gottlieb, Agard, & Kukic, 1975).

Based on the nature of the differences in teacher interactions found in this study, it was concluded that handicapped students, compared to their nonhandicapped peers, received fewer opportunities for active involvement in academic activities. This conclusion has important educational implications since degree of task involvement and opportunities to respond has been consistently related to effective learning (e.g., Brophy, 1979; Centra & Potter, 1980; Dunkin & Biddle, 1974). Moreover, the role of the teacher in fostering active involvement and providing opportunities to respond is even more crucial with mildly handicapped students, particularly the learning disabled who have been characterized as inactive learners (Torgesen, 1977), lacking strategies for actively structuring

information. In addition, many authors have at- tributed learning disabled children's academic problems to (a) a lack of selective attention (see Hallahan & Reeve, 1980) and (b) verbal deficits (Vellutino, 1977). Consequently, such techni- ques as asking and restating questions, and providing handicapped students with structuring comments regarding their responses are essen- tial to helping them focus on the relevant aspects of the content being taught, and to train their verbal skills.

Regular teachers' perceptions of the objectives of mainstreamed education for handicapped students may have contributed to the apparent lack of concern with academics suggested by the nature of their interactions with those students. Specifically, if the teachers believe that their primary role is to promote handicapped students' socialization and emotional adjustment, they may place these goals above the teaching of content. If, in addition, teachers attribute the students' achievement problems to inherent limitations in ability, they may begin to treat handicapped pupils in ways that, although well intended, are likely to hamper their achievement. Brophy (1982) described this behavior pattern in teacher interactions with low achievers, exemplified in teacher efforts not to call on those students to answer public questions "in order to avoid putting them on a spot" (p. 46).

In support of this interpretation it should be recalled that perhaps the most accepted argu- ment in favor of mainstreaming was that it would foster social adjustment of handicapped children. The subsequent emphasis on this argu- ment may have led teachers to consider socialization as the main goal of education for handicapped students. Similarly, the finding that the handicapped students in the present study did not receive less praise and more criticism (although they probably accomplished less aca- demically than their nonhandicapped peers) also reflects a general concern with the socioemo- tional aspects of education. Again, regarding the distribution of praise, well-intended teacher behaviors may be detrimental to the handicapped child. That is, if praise is noncontingent on achievement and/or effort, it may favor the development of learned helplessness, resulting in student passivity and lack of persistence in completing tasks (Grimes, 1981; Thomas, 1979).




Another explanation for the low frequency of verbal academic exchanges between teachers and handicapped students is that teachers may avoid such interaction as a way of controlling pacing (i.e., the speed with which the students move through the content to be learned). Sup- port for this interpretation may be found in different sources. For example, a series of studies conducted by Cooper and his associates (Coop- er, 1979) indicated that teachers perceive low achievers as slower than the other students in the class; further, because long interactions with individual students, especially in whole-class situations, often become boring for other group members and frequently lead to classroom dis- ruption, teachers tend to avoid public academic interactions with low achievers. According to Cooper (1979), concern with pacing would also explain why low achievers receive less rephrase: Teachers are less likely to pursue an answer with them, assuming that it will take longer to arrive at the appropriate answer. Further support for this interpretation comes from research on attitudes toward mainstreaming, which shows that the vast majority (85 %) of regular class teachers feel that they do not have time to effectively teach handicapped students (Hudson, Graham, & Warner, 1979).

The suggested interpretations of the present findings should be regarded with caution. Al- though it seems plausible to assume that sample teachers held certain expectations for the handicapped students mainstreamed in their classes, no conclusions can be drawn about the nature of these expectations or their relationship with observed teacher behavior, since these issues were not addressed in this investigation. Similar- ly, the design of the study does not allow conclusions as to whether or not the mildly handicapped label effected teacher expectations and/or behavior beyond the actual student behavior. The speculations made in this respect were based on comparisons between the results of this study and those obtained with low achievers. The intent of the present investigation was to describe the extent to which teacher interactions with the handicapped differ from their interactions with modal nonhandicapped students in the same classroom-a necessary first step for teacher training and programming aimed at enhancing the effectiveness of mainstreaming.

In sum, the overall conclusion of this study is

that differential teacher treatment of handicapped and nonhandicapped students results in the former being provided with a less stimulating learning environment. An emphasis on socio- emotional goals in the education of the handicapped and the typical pace of the regular class were suggested as having contributed to the differential treatment. This conclusion contradicts that of Thompson et al. (1982), who suggested that, although differences between handicapped and nonhandicapped students were found, the nature of such differences was not likely to result in a more effective learning environment for any single group. Also, the data partially contradict the conclusions of Thompson, Vitale, and Jew- ett (1984), who reported that their results did not support the supposition that handicapped children in mainstreamed settings are at a disadvantage because of preferential treatment of nonhandicapped classmates. In contrast, our results suggest that handicapped pupils are at a disadvantage in such settings. In both studies, however, handicapped students received more total interactions than did nonhandicapped children. The analytic methods used in the present study - employing structure coefficients rather than regression weights - led to the interpretation that the differences in total amount of interactions were not meaningful.

REFERENCES Bock, D. (1975). Multivariate statistical methods in

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McKinney, J., McClure, S., & Feagans, L. (1982). Classroom behavior of learning disabled children. Learning Disability Quarterly, 5, 45-52.

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Teacher Interactions with Mainstreamed Handicapped Students and Their Nonhandicapped Peers