Page 168 - Vseživljenjsko učenje kot temelj trajnostne družbe

Maja Lebeničnik and Karmen Drljić

sion concept; (b) educational strategies to use with students with special
needs; and (c) psychological characteristics of students with special needs.
Participantsself-assessedtheirknowledgeona5-pointscale(1–‘Idon’tknow
well at all’; 5 – ‘I know very well’). Principal component analysis was con-
ducted on three items. One clear component explained 73.3 of the vari-
ance. So, it was statistically appropriate to merge the three variables into
one composite score. All three items loaded strongly (>0.79) on the single
extracted component. However, one item significantly reduced the reliabil-
ity of the scale and was deleted. The reliability for the remaining two items
was high (rSB =0.84).
A Demographic questionnairewas employed to ascertain information re-
garding gender, age and programme enrolment.

Data Gathering
Using a non-random convenience sampling approach, data were collected
through the 1KA online platform from January to February 2024. We obtained
ethical approval from the University of Primorska’s Commission for Ethics in
Research Involving Human Participants (Approval No. 4264-41-6/23). The par-
ticipants provided their informed consent to participate in this study.

Data Analysis
After establishing psychometric characteristics of scales, we performed a set
of statistical analysis to check the hypotheses. We performed a t-test and
Mann-Whitney U test to check Hypothesis 1. For Hypothesis 2 we calculated
Spearman’s rho correlation coefficient. A hierarchical linear regression with
enter method was conducted to test Hypothesis 3.

Results with Discussion
In our survey we investigated the nature of ableism among students from
various educational study programmes and aimed to identify significant pre-
dictors of ableism of prospective educators.

Ableism among Education Students from Different Study Programmes
Our sample consisted of students from five different study programmes.
Some study programmes prepare students to a greater extent than other
programmes to work with vulnerable groups (such as students with spe-
cial educational needs, marginal groups, etc.) in and/or outside of educa-
tional settings. On the basis of this distinction, we compared self-assessed

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