High- and Average-Achieving Students' Perceptions of Disabilities and of Students with Disabilities in Inclusive Classrooms (Report‪)‬

Empirical data, a lot of it 20 or more years old, has examined impacts of grouping from undifferentiated to ability-determined. Kulik and Kulik (1992) conducted an extensive meta-analysis examining impact on academic grades, but did not address interpersonal outcomes. Students of all ability levels benefited from grouping, but Kulik and Kulik carefully pointed out that the critical variable was the curricular adaptation that took place within different kinds of grouping, not the grouping itself. Self-esteem is enhanced for gifted students in separate classes (Coleman & Fults, 1982), but such studies have looked at between-group comparisons, not interactions. Krasner (n.d.) identified nearly 300 articles on attitudes toward inclusion and persons with disabilities from 1981 to 2000; he and his colleagues have cataloged hundreds more since, but none focused on gifted students. Leyser and Price (1985) examined the effectiveness of intervention aimed at modifying the attitudes of gifted students toward people with disabilities. Although gifted students who participated in the training (n = 22) expressed somewhat more favorable attitudes toward disabilities than gifted students who did not (n = 38), this difference was not statistically significant. Leyser and Price did not use a control group, so could not draw conclusions regarding whether attitudes differed between gifted and nongifted students, and did not conduct pretesting, so could not determine if the attitudes of the gifted needed altering in the first place.