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12 What are the Factors Facilitating Successful Inclusion of Students with Behavioral Disabilities? Dissertation Proposal Submitted to University School of Education in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF EDUCATION by E. Covington, Georgia October 2021 Abstract Comment by Northcentral University: The abstract should be included in the dissertation manuscript only. It should not be included in the dissertation proposal. The word Abstract should be centered, bolded, and begin on its own page. Begin writing here… Comment by Northcentral University: The text should be left-justified (not indented) and double-spaced with no breaks. Checklist: ☐ Briefly introduce the study topic, state the research problem, and describe who or what is impacted by this problem. ☐ Clearly articulate the study purpose and guiding theoretical or conceptual framework of the study. ☐ Provide details about the research methodology, participants, questions, design, procedures, and analysis. ☐ Clearly present the results in relation to the research questions. ☐ State the conclusions to include both the potential implications of the results on and the recommendations for future research and practice. ☐ Do include citations and abbreviations or acronyms, except those noted as exceptions by the American Psychological Association (APA). ☐ Do exceed 350 words. Strive for one page. Acknowledgements Comment by Northcentral University: You may include an optional acknowledgements page in normal paragraph format in the dissertation manuscript. Do not include such a page in the dissertation proposal. The word Acknowledgements should be centered, bolded, and begin on its own page. Begin writing here… Table of Contents Comment by Northcentral University: Use the Table of Contents feature in Word. For additional information on creating a table of contents, click here. For information on updating the table of contents, click here, and for video resources from the Academic Success Center on formatting the table of contents, click here. Do not manually add headings into the Table of Contents. The headings in the table of contents are populated from the Styles gallery using the APA Level 1 and Heading 2 styles. Only include APA heading levels 1 and 2 in the table of contents. Use the Heading 2 style from the Styles gallery to add level two headings in the document. Update the table of contents to reflect any new level 2 headings added to document. Comment by Northcentral University: For Academic Success Center resources on formatting the table of contents, click here. For assistance, use the videos in the Tables and Headers tab and handouts in the Format tab. Comment by Northcentral University: Ensure the headings in the table of contents match those in the document. Please note the place holders are included in this table of contents: “XXX” under Chapter 2 must be replaced with the themes generated from the integrative critical review of the literature. If your study is qualitative, “Operational Definitions of Variables” under Chapter 3 must be deleted. “XXX” under Chapter 4 must be replaced with “Trustworthiness” for a qualitative study, “Validity and Reliability” for a quantitative study, and “Trustworthiness/Validity and Reliability” for a mixed methods study. The number of research questions listed under Chapter 4 must align with the number of research questions in your study. Under Appendices, each “XXX” must be replaced with the titles of the appendix. Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Statement of the Problem 2 Purpose of the Study 2 Introduction to Theoretical or Conceptual Framework 3 Introduction to Research Methodology and Design 4 Research Questions 4 Hypotheses 4 Significance of the Study 5 Definitions of Key Terms 6 Summary 6 Chapter 2: Literature Review 7 Theoretical or Conceptual Framework 7 Subtopic 8 Summary 8 Chapter 3: Research Method 10 Research Methodology and Design 10 Population and Sample 10 Materials or Instrumentation 11 Operational Definitions of Variables 12 Study Procedures 13 Data Analysis 13 Assumptions 14 Limitations 14 Delimitations 14 Ethical Assurances 15 Summary 15 Chapter 4: Findings 16 XXX of the Data 16 Results 17 Evaluation of the Findings 18 Summary 18 Chapter 5: Implications, Recommendations, and Conclusions 19 Implications 19 Recommendations for Practice 20 Recommendations for Future Research 20 Conclusions 20 References 22 Appendix A XXX 23 Appendix B XXX 24 List of Tables Comment by Northcentral University: The words List of Tables should be centered, bolded, and begin on its own page Use the Table of Figures feature in Word and select “Table” as the caption label. For additional information and guidance, click here. Tip: For formatting the caption for tables, table headings should be double spaced and placed above the table. The word “Table” and the number should be bolded. The table title is in title case and italics. Comment by Northcentral University: Click here to review a video from the Academic Success Center on creating the List of Tables. Begin list of tables here… List of Figures Comment by Northcentral University: The words List of Figures should be centered, bolded, and begin on its own page Use the Table of Figures feature in Word and select “Figure” as the caption label. For additional information and guidance, click here. Tip: For formatting the caption for figures, figure headings should be double spaced and placed above the figure. The word “Figure” and the number should be bolded. The figure title is in title case and italics. Comment by Northcentral University: Click here to review a video on creating the List of Figures. Begin list of figures here… 1 1 Chapter 1: Introduction Comment by Northcentral University: When preparing pagination, lowercase Roman numerals are used for the front matter pages prior to the first page of Chapter 1. The Roman numerals need to be centered and placed in the footer of each front matter page. Starting in Chapter 1, page numbers need to be placed at the upper right of each page header. Chapter headings are formatted as Level 1. Review a formatting APA headings video in the Academic Success Center here. APA Style recommends one space between sentences. Education is an important exercise where an individual receives learning services or offers learning services to another party using a structured format described as the curriculum. Education is an important resource that everyone in society deserves to receive, especially the youth, and it should be facilitated through teaching programs and development with the best curriculum. Education is expected to be offered to all the students despite the differences and diversity that are experienced in the society and the differences present including race, color, gender and physical challenges (OHRC, 2021). Students with disabilities are a group of students that encounter various challenges in receiving their education that make it difficult for them to compete favorably with other students without physical defects. Students with disabilities are known to lack the required support system and resources that are likely to boost them to compete favorably in the access to education (Newman et al., 2020). There is the push for a more equitable society. In terms of access to basic resources that includes education that is key to everyone and various governments globally are struggling to allocate more resources to support the students with disabilities to also access quality education like their counterparts, but there is still a huge gap that has not been filled (OHRC, 2021). Students with disabilities are the most affected group among the other cases of disparities when it comes to the access of education and this is what makes their access to education difficult. The challenges that are encountered by the students living with disabilities include the lack of technology that supports their access to education, lack of trained and skilled teachers, and lack of professional development for teachers. Students with disabilities have not been prioritized when it comes to their access to education since their teachers lack the required training and skills that are necessary for them to deliver quality instruction. Teachers require specialized training to acquire skills necessary to handle the sensitivity attached to people living with disabilities (OHRC, 2021). The teachers that work with students requiring special attention must be patient and empathetic about the students situation and have the willingness to support them. Flexible communication skills also are necessary for the teachers to have in order to make sure that they are communicating well with the student for a productive outcome. In addition, there is the need for professional development for the teacher that is not available and because the work at times is stressful, the teachers that lack motivation through empowerment in their career development result to a poor productivity when it comes to attending to the students (OHRC, 2021). Lack of technology is another problem that is experienced by the students with disabilities making it difficult for them to receive a quality education like normal students. There is the need for assistive technology for the students living with disabilities that includes videotaped social skills and variable speed recorders and many other technologies (Newman et al., 2020). Students with behavioral disorders must get connected to society due to the critical needs which require supervision at all times. It is imperative to facilitate development of valid solutions for the problems as they affect possibility of creating suitable solutions for affected persons. Inclusive education is imperative to facilitate proper improvements in students’ after discovering how they get affected when working with students in similar learning environments. The process of making sure children with learning disabilities get included in general education is imperative to facilitate societal improvement. This is possible by determining the students’ characteristics, abilities, and needs to ensure they get placed in the proper environment. Inclusion of students requires teachers that have positive attitude towards all students regardless of any barriers to their learning. This would get facilitated after accessing instructional strategies and targeting them to the proper students. Learners have diverse behavioral disorders like inattention, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), learning disorders, depression, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and conduct disorders (Barrington, 2019). Issues develop in the entire learning environment when there are problems for learners who do not feel that their issues get addressed. There is a strong need to promote equality in the entire learning environment after performing and discovering how learners get affected by internal learning improvement barriers. There would be a reliable teaching environment once learners understand diverse instructional strategies and how they get focused on for all learning management procedures. Creation of a dependable method to assess all learners’ needs is the best process for educators to develop productive learning environments. Application of collaboration is a crucial activity that facilitates internal educational improvement after accessing students’ needs and using the knowledge to facilitate attainment of full learner potential. Some students with behavioral disorders often feel discouraged due to appearing to be different from other learners. This affects required development as it gets hard for the students to reach full potential. In this case, limited access of learning resources affects learners’ improvement as it gets difficult for them to display how their unique activities facilitate full educational improvement. Inclusive education is strongly dependent on teachers’ attitudes as students depend on them to facilitate learning improvements. Students with disabilities get affected due to difficulty in promoting sufficient educational resources. Resources can include technological tools, departments that deal with disabled children, learning supervisors who assess students’ needs, and source of funding for the learners’ issues. All these problems affect sufficient change management for learners’ issues as it can be difficult to facilitate proper internal changes without transforming the learning environment’s needs. Cate et al. (2018) mentioned that development of a positive relationship between teachers and learners is the best method to enhance development of valid knowledge. From this perspective analysis of diverse educational improvement methods is crucial to allow student to receive holistic learning. All the procedures of enhancing valid educational improvements require frequent assessments to determine the best outcome for learners’ issues. This paper shall perform research to determine the best outcome for learners by accessing valid knowledge in all areas to determine the best solutions for learners’ problems. The basic explanation behind the failure of offering all the mentioned needs is the fact that there is not enough funding and finance necessary to equip the learning institution and the teachers with the required resources. Elementary and secondary special education services were delayed and reduced as a result of this, according to the report. Often, accommodation decisions are made solely on monetary considerations, rather than the assessment of the real needs of disabled students. Some programs include eligibility rules and limits that create human rights concerns at the post-secondary level (Viner et al., 2020). There are a number of reasons why most schools are unable to provide the required accommodations for impaired pupils. Many schools around the world struggle with funding. The pupils suffer when their school does not have books, laptops, and other materials. If these students are impaired, the repercussions are even more severe. Disability specialists are rare in many educational institutions. In some school and college administrations, teachers and professors are not trained on how to interact with students who have special needs (McNicholl et al., 2019). As a result, schooling is rendered essentially ineffectual in most cases. Moreover, a lack of suitable measures in the curriculum can lead to a catastrophe because they cannot learn as they should. Assistance technology may be more effective than traditional treatments in helping students with disabilities achieve the goals set in their Individual Education Plans. In addition to helping the student understand how to perform the assignment, assistive technology can also allow the student to avoid a tough section. In the case of students who choose digital versions of books, they are circumventing a tricky issue (McNicholl et al., 2019). While reading aloud, the learner can acquire unfamiliar words if he or she concentrates on the computer screen. In computer-assisted training, software and programs are used on a variety of devices to teach and practice. Students with learning impairments can benefit from this nonjudgmental automated exercise and practice. There is evidence that computer-assisted education can help children with learning difficulties improve their spelling and expressive writing skills by reducing distractibility. According to research, teachers endure continuous frustration with coping with their students learning challenges, as well as the educational systems flaws in connection to correcting teachers lack of special education knowledge and teaching tactics (Crispel & Kasperski, 2019). However, after going through a retraining session in special education the teachers pointed to two important disparities. The first adjustment was related to practical issues, especially, the adoption of instructional methodologies and strategies depending on the particular student’s degree of functional skills. An intriguing discovery acquired from this study was the homogeneity of the interviewees’ viewpoints, independent of their age, the ages of their children or their teaching experience. This homogeneity of opinion reveals that despite the actions the school system professes to have adopted addressing inclusion, their influence is minor at best (Crispel & Kasperski, 2019). Furthermore, the teachers acknowledged that the knowledge they had obtained regarding learning challenges signals a turning point, not just in their profession but also in their personal life. To make teaching more caring and attentive to the needs of students in general, as well as kids with learning disabilities in particular, a new technique was developed. During this period, they established a less intuitive, more informed teaching method. It is crucial to keep in mind that good perspectives towards inclusiveness may not automatically convert into empathy for children with learning issues while the majority of instructors expressed good opinions regarding inclusion, their teaching techniques vary, according to a recent poll (Crispel & Kasperski, 2019). When it comes to training students with learning difficulties, one group of teachers employed a pedagogical strategy. However, the other group of teachers utilized an empathic approach, generating a more protective atmosphere for students with problems. Teacher empathy must be developed in this situation in the direction of students who have learning disabilities. Statement of the Problem Comment by Northcentral University: Tip: Applied dissertations should be practice-based. The documented problem might be a practical problem or issue in the profession or study context for which there is not already an acceptable solution. When defining the problem, a clear distinction must be drawn between what exists currently and what is desired. An applied study does not necessarily require generalizable results beyond the study site; however, it must address a problem relevant and exists outside of the study site. Similarly, a PhD dissertation must focus on a problem relevant and exists outside of the study site. Additionally, the study must make a substantive, scholarly contribution to both the research and theory. Comment by Northcentral University: Tip: Review the limitations and calls for future research in the relevant scholarly literature for guidance in identifying a problem. Comment by Northcentral University: Tip: There are a couple of group sessions in the Academic Success Center per week in which students can engage with a live academic coach as well as other students who share the goal of enhancing their problem statement development skills. Learn more about this session and find the link to register here. The problem to be addressed in this study is the lack of trained and skilled teachers to service the students with disabilities, lack of technology devices to facilitate learning, and lack of professional development to provide teachers and administration on better ways to handle students with disabilities. According to the scholarly articles, the problems of financial costs were experienced by the institutions, this made it difficult for the institution to provide a better training session to their staff members, the training session is said to be more expensive than many institutions could afford, and if they could afford to pay for the session then it could only be done once in a year. Lastly, financial issues lead institutions not to hire qualified and advanced teachers because they require a high salary that they could not afford. (Simpson, 2017). When the institutions are experiencing unstable finances, they face several problems compared to those in a stable state. Students who require special needs care are seen to be more affected hence a need to implement a solution to safeguard the education that is meant to model them to be better people in society despite their disabilities. A solution that needs to be implemented to resolve the problem faced in an institution that takes care of students with disabilities is to seek financial assistance from a financial institution that is concerned with education and use the finances to develop better facilities, and purchase the technology devices needed for their learning activities. Administrators should be involved in the development and training sessions that prepare educators to be able to take care of the needs of students with disabilities and provide them equal student rights. They should strive to come up with ways to improve the overall school performance of students, and use opportunities to build relationships between teachers and students with disabilities. There should be a willingness to be part of change and make adjustments that will lead to better performance. Additionally, there should be the availability of technology that supports the students with special needs to overcome the challenges they face, leading to poor performance. Purpose of the Study Comment by Northcentral University: Tip: The Academic Success Center has a weekly group session on Purpose Statements. Learn more about this session and find the link to register here. The purpose of this qualitative study is to perform research on the problem of limited support in education curriculum for children living with disabilities. It will include proving that students receive limited support, explaining why the support is limited, and providing possible fixes for the problem. There have been issues related to lack of trained teachers and technology that creates better environment for learning. Use of surveys is the applicable study method to generate insight into the current curriculum and how it provides development for students. It is common to encounter problems when the curriculum does not get structured to handle educational improvement for students. Special education requires technology use to facilitate differentiation learning and flexibility (Dikusar, 2018). In this way, it would be easy to encourage students and to track their progress. Descriptive design would get applied as the study design since it adopts the use of variables to generate insight into the research process (Ranganathan & Aggarwal, 2018). It would be easy to facilitate learning once teachers receive technical assistance and are able to provide services suitable to their students needs. The independent variable is ability of special needs students to gain educational improvement while the dependent variable is the need to improve on technological adaptations. The target population is children in high school in Lithonia,Ga and those living with physical and learning disabilities. Solution of issues like lack of enough technology for the school with special needs students will hinder the school staff from learning the federal guidance put by the society (Dikusar 2018). The study will be conducted at a High School, in Lithonia, Georgia. This particular High School has one of the highest Special Education populations in the county. The targeted population for the study will be a total of 50 participants, including teachers, parents, and special needs students. The data collection tools will be questionnaires, focus group discussions, and interviews. After application of the study method, it would be easy to generate reliable techniques of handling support for students based on the ability to implement programs aimed at educational improvement. Issues like lack of trained teachers is detrimental and requires training handled early for proper learning environment (Mader, 2017). Application of sample size determination and hypothesis testing are suitable techniques of handling the educational improvement for students (Dillard, 2018). Introduction to Theoretical Framework Comment by Northcentral University: Select the heading that reflects whether you are using a theoretical or conceptual framework, but do not keep both words in the title. For PhD - Theoretical Framework, for applied doctorate Conceptual Framework. The theoretical framework is the most favorable, in this case, study due to its structure in the research study. This framework distinguishes how data is perceived and interpreted through research analysis. The use of a theoretical framework can equip learners with analyzed data from past events. This theory can be subdivided into psychological, organizational, and social ideas, thus facilitating definitions of different concepts. To create a theoretical framework, it is crucial to outline the problem statement and research questions. Concepts often have several explanations which are clearly defined through the theoretical framework. The theoretical framework determines the critical concepts in research and them based on literature review. In this study, we are gaining various skills, including communication and technological skills, to help facilitate the necessary improvement through the establishment of solutions. Theoretical framework equips researchers with existing knowledge to help make relevant decisions based on hypotheses (Löfgren & Nordblom, 2020). This is through a depiction of a theoretical model that facilitates clarity of the fundamental mechanisms to help p individuals decide and respond to behavioral changes to come up with solutions. To investigate the problem, the problem statement outlines the problem, and the problem purpose is also outlined for the researchers. For example, in this case, the problem s the lack of technology, especially for students with disabilities, and teachers need the motivation to help develop productivity in the organization. Theoretical framework in research question involves defining all terms clearly. Thus meeting its primary goal is to represent and outline more information through comparisons and choosing the most relevant questions, thus establishing the rationale behind the research. For example, behavioral changes in students will lead to different inclusion of various methods to help solve their issues. The theoretical framework strengthens the study through: · Allowing the reader to evaluate precise statements. · Connects researcher to the accessible acquaintance. · Articulates theoretical assumptions, thus permitting a green light. · Gives alerts to scrutinize how variables might differ and under which circumstances. To develop an adequate theoretical framework, it is crucial to develop necessary strategies for better integration and favorable achievements. These strategies include: 1. Find answers to research questions through a literature review 2. Have a deep insight on the critical variables in contribution to the overlooked effects. 3. Distinguish and explain propositions. 4. Look deeper into the thesis title and research predicament. Therefore, the theoretical framework is based on how the nature of the research problem is conceptualized based on analysis chosen to investigate issues. Thereby equipping readers with the knowledge to understand the context perspective. Introduction to Research Methodology and Design A qualitative research method would be appropriate for the research to address the lack of trained and skilled teachers to handle the students with disabilities, lack of technology devices to facilitate learning, and lack of professional development to provide teachers and administration on better ways to handle students with disabilities. This method will allow the flexibility required when analyzing the participants opinions. The study will recount the group experience and the experiences they faced in their disabilities; a phenomenological approach to analyze data will be used in the study. It will allow the participants the opportunity to describe their individual experiences. The qualitative research method is most appropriate because it enables the reader to get a deeper understanding of the experiences of the students while allowing the researcher to conduct in depth observations, interviews, and discussions needed to address the “how” and “why” of the problem. The purpose of the design is to structure the research and provide significant findings that will answer the research questions. The study will be conducted in a High School setting and will include a total of 50 participants, comprised of teachers, parents, and special needs students. The data collection tools will be questionnaires, focus group discussions, and interviews. The proposed methods will accomplish the goals by use of Questionnaire for teachers that will help collect data regarding research objectives; using this method the researcher will be able to collect data on the realistic approaches required for teachers training that will enhance the students performance in special school education. Research questions will show the need for funds to be released to help the school purchase the modern technology equipment that will make learning easy for …