Attitudes and prejudices towards students with special needs

Abstract

Within the student population, students with special needs represent an important minority group. As such, they are often influenced by negative attitudes and prejudices. These biases (directly or indirectly) reverberate through the general relations among higher education institutions, impacting both its employees and students with special needs. A general attitude and its consequential behaviour both strongly influence whether the experience of students with disabilities in higher education will be positive or negative. Knowledge of attitudes and prejudices therefore remains crucial in enabling an insight into an overall picture about students with special needs in higher education. This paper thus discusses attitudes and prejudices towards students with special needs and examines how they appear, why they often happen to be negative, and which factors are worth taking into account when considering changes in attitude and means of combating prejudice.