Abstract:

Social needs and their fulfillment are one of the important social aspects of the integration of pupils with special educational needs included in the mainstream of education and are among the important indicators of pupil satisfaction and school success. The aim of the paper is to determine the degree of fulfillment of social needs of younger school age pupils and to find out the perception of classroom climate in primary school classes during a pandemic situation caused by Covid-19 with a closer look at the differences between a group of pupils with special educational needs (SEN) and pupils of the standard population. The research group consisted of 104 pupils with SEN (52 boys, 52 girls) and 211 pupils of the standard population (82 boys, 129 girls) in Slovakia. Social needs focused on the needs of the place, safety, incentives, support and limits were measured by a questionnaire created by the authors of the paper and filled in by students of the 4th and 5th grades of primary schools in electronic form in March 2021. The questionnaire was based on the Pesso-Boyden System Psychomotor concept. Cronbach's alpha of individual subscales ranged from 0.587 (need for limits) to 0.857 (need for safety). My Class Inventory investigated the class climate. The results show that pupils with SEN report significantly lower satisfaction with the fulfillment of all the needs than pupils in the standard population. At the same time, differences were found in the perception of the classroom climate, where pupils with SEN perceived an increase in conflicts within the classroom, higher difficulty of the curriculum and lower cohesion within the classroom than pupils in the standard population. The relationship of pupils with SEN to the class and the overall satisfaction within the class was reduced compared to the pupils of the standard population, but both groups perceived the degree of competition in the class in a similar way. Presence teaching for primary school pupils in Slovakia was replaced by a distance online form during the Covid-19 pandemic from November 2020 to April 2021, and during this period social needs in the school environment were insufficiently saturated, which may have caused widening differences between pupils with SEN and standard population and may have an impact on the school performance of pupils in both groups in the coming years. To restore healthy relationships in school classes, the active participation of teachers and the implementation of facilitation activities will be necessary to increase the activation and motivation level of students, so that the impact on their overall school success during this period is as small as possible. This study was conducted within the project VEGA 1/0120/19 entitled “Movement correction of the problematic behavior of students from the standard population and students with special educational needs educated under the conditions of integration”.

Keywords:

Social needs, pupil with special educational needs, inclusion, class climate.