Childrens Perception Of Fairness In Classroom And Interpersonal Situations Involving Peers With Severe Disabilities

Elementary-aged children (kindergarten, first grade, and second grade), attending classrooms that fully included peers with severe disabilities, judged a series of scenarios comprising common teacher-related and social situations. The scenarios contained different degrees of ambiguity regarding equitable treatment of the protagonists; some stories involved only typical children, and some involved children with disabilities. Participants were asked to judge the fairness of the outcome, why it was fair or unfair, how the characters might feel, and what could have been done to make the situation more fair. In general the children were very sophisticated in their judgments, using consistent principles of social justice, regardless of disability. Few age-related differences emerged, although there was a slight tendency for older children to make excuses for children with disabilities. Even young students demonstrated appropriate empathy for the feelings arising from being left out or being wrongly blamed. Suggested solutions tended to be short-term but based largely on equality of opportunity, and at least some of the children were able to recommend equitable policy changes in classroom and social practices.