Background. Inclusive education is a system of education that provides opportunities for students with disabilities and giftedness to be in same the learning environment with regular students. Inclusive education encourages children with or without special needs to learn together in the same setting. The implementation of inclusive education requires not only the availability of facilities and physical support, but also the availability of human resources, in this case pre-service teachers. Pre-service teachers, who come from different educational backgrounds, are one of the important components in implementation of inclusive education. that will interact and deal with children with special needs in the learning process. Therefore, the attitude of pre-service teachers towards inclusive education is an important component in the acceptance of children with special needs in the context of inclusive education.

Attitude is defined as the psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity (object, person, institution, or occurrence) through the degree of favorable or unfavorable. The attitude that cannot be observed are directly reflected in three aspects: cognitive, affective, and behavior. Someone who has a positive attitude toward an object, then tend to have a positive affect and behavior toward the object. Pre-service teachers attitudes toward inclusive education is affected by several factors, including the type of disability; the severity of the disability, mild, moderate, and severe; major or programs taken; courses, service-based introductory diversity course; courses in the field of inclusive education; gender of pre-service teachers; training experience and level of teaching experience with children with special needs; and the experience of interacting with the children with special needs.

Methods. Based on previous findings, this study aims to compare the attitudes of pre-service teachers toward inclusive education based on experiences of direct interaction and teaching children with special needs. Participants are the college student in Jakarta who major in Teacher Training, Early Childhood Education, and Special Education. Participants are senior students (minimum semester 6) who have take the internship course to practice teaching skills  in regular schools and/or inclusive schools. Students in the programs are pre-service teachers who specialize in teaching preschool level and above. The research hypothesis is that pre-service teachers who have had direct interactions and teaching experience with children with special needs have more positive attitudes towards inclusive education than students who haven’t had such experiences.

There are two variables in this study, namely the socio-demographic and attitude. Socio-demographic consists of gender, type of child’s disability, courses taken, training experience, teaching experience with children with special needs, and the experience of interacting with children with special needs. Attitude consists of three components, namely cognitive, affective, and behavior. The number of samples in this study are 200 students from two groups of samples; 100 students from the final year in Early Childhood Education major and 100 students from the final year on Special Education major. The sampling technique used is purposive sampling, where the sample is selected based on the criteria set above.

In the study, the attitudes of pre-service teachers toward inclusive education is measured by Multidimentional Attitudes toward Inclusive Education (MATIES) ooriginally made by Mahat and has been adapted to Indonesian version (MATIES-VI) by Kurniawati et.al. It is a self-report questionnaire that includes three cognitive, affective, and behavior components of attitude. Reliability of each component in MATIES is 0.707, 0.778, and 0.849 for each components respectively. There are 18 items in Likert type scale with a form response ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). Each component consists of 6 items. Data will be analyzed using analysis of descriptive statistics and Independent Sample t-test. Descriptive statistical analysis is used to find out the value of the average (mean), standard deviation, minimum and maximum values of the variables examined. This technique is used to see the demographic picture of the participants. The Independent Sample t-test, is used to find out the significance of mean difference between the two sample groups.

Results. This study is on the process of data retrieval.

Conclusion. This research is still in progress.

Added-Values. The results of this study are expected to provide information on the importance of direct interaction and teaching experience with children with special needs for pre-service teachers who will become educators in inclusive schools.

Keywords: inclusive education, attitudes, pre-service teachers, children with special needs, college student

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