It Is Never Too Early: Social Participation of Early Childhood Education Students from the Perspective of Families, Teachers and Students

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review your article. The study on the importance of social participation in inclusive ECE classrooms is very important and makes a meaningful contribution to our collective understanding of supportive early learning environments. Below are some comments and suggestions which I believe would strengthen the manuscript.

1. I appreciate that much of the literature that is cited is fairly new (published in 2017 or beyond); however, it may be beneficial in the introduction to include some more seminal works as well when making points regarding findings that are well established in the literature. For example, on line 54, the authors note that inclusive educational settings are important for all students. This is well established in the research literature; yet, only two newer studies are cited. It may be worthwhile to cite some seminal research or systematic reviews/meta-analyses to justify this conclusion. The authors might consider reviewing and adding works such as:

De Boer, A., Pijl, S. J., & Minnaert, A. (2010). Attitudes of parents towards inclusive education: A review of the literature. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 25(2), 165-181.

Katz, J., & Mirenda, P. (2002). Including students with developmental disabilities in general education classrooms: Educational benefits. International journal of special education, 17(2), 14-24.

Salend, S. J., & Garrick Duhaney, L. M. (1999). The impact of inclusion on students with and without disabilities and their educators. Remedial and special education, 20(2), 114-126.

Baker, E. T. (1995). The effects of inclusion on learning. Educational leadership, 52(4), 33-35.

2. It would be helpful to have a bit more discussion regarding why social participation and opportunities to develop relationships, engage in social reciprocity, etc. maybe especially beneficial for young children with ASD. For example, the authors may provide background regarding the social deficits/challenges that are common among young children with ASD as well as a discussion of the research literature regarding the social participation of young children with ASD. I am less familiar with this specific area of the literature; however, when running a database search (e.g., in EBSCO or PsychInfo) regarding social participation and ASD, there seems to be a wealth of empirical work that could be addressed to provide greater background and rationale for the current study. This can be later tied to implications and directions for future research.

3. The age of the participants is a time when there is rapid development of the sense of self and understanding of others. For example, children begin to experience self-conscious emotions (e.g., shame, guilt, empathy). Still, these emotions are not fully developed until middle/late childhood. I wonder if this is a point worth making somewhere? Perhaps the children who demonstrate more acceptance of peers with special needs have further developed self-conscious emotions (e.g., a sense of empathy toward peers or shame for leaving a peer out or answer in a way that is not socially acceptable). I am not certain if this is worth bringing up. Perhaps it is part of your discussion. I think it would be worthwhile either in the introduction or discussion to discuss the developmental considerations of sense of self and understanding of others. This is important in understanding your study and results contextually.

For instance, you could discuss this in the context of lines 490-495. The authors write,"The importance of attending to this aspect is further reinforced by the results provided by the cluster analysis, as they identify a group of students (10 children out of 85) who repeatedly gave responses of negative attitude toward inclusion throughout the questionnaire. This would mean that, already at the young age of 4-5 years, coinciding with the end of the stage of early childhood, there are students who systematically reject peers who are different."

This conclusion seems casual and overreaching. An alternative explanation is that the 10 children with negative views perhaps have not yet developed self-conscious emotions.

4. It also seems that the previous research on teacher readiness and training for inclusive classrooms may need to be discussed to better understand the qualitative findings from teachers.

5. The quantitative findings at best should be described as descriptive statistics. They are just frequency counts. Some of the conclusions seem a bit over reaching and should be tempered. There are times in the discussion when casual inferences are made. The methodology does not allow for these statements; these should be revised.

6. I appreciated the comparison of the current findings with previous research. This was valuable.

Author Response

Responses to reviewer 1 are sent in the attached document 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for the submission of your article which I read with interest. 

Your article requires further attention and structuring to make a contribution to this field of research.  Please find my comments below:

 You make several statements as to the purpose or focus of your study throughout your paper.  On lines – in the Abstract it is a general statement of “delving” into social participation in early childhood education centres that include students with ASD. Lines 63-65 you state the study is focused on what takes place in classrooms that care for the inclusion of all students.  Then in lines 102-104 you state the interested of the study is the construct of social participation in centres….. 

You need to make sure you are being consistent in your statements concerning your focus or aims as some of these would suggest you should have undertaken observation if you are working to determine what happens in the centres.  From reading your manuscript, it is more along the lines of you using a survey to garner the attitudes of early childhood aged children toward the inclusion of students with ASD. 

This brings me to my next point about the aims of your paper.  You ask three core questions (Lines 110-116).  The first two I do not believe have been answered through your survey.  Your survey again asks about attitudes towards a fictional student.  Attitudes inform actions but knowing an individual’s attitudes does not confirm if there is actual peer acceptance or positive friendships. 

You would be better to state you explored the attitudes of students towards the incision of children with ASD.

This also means your statements of focus in lines 129-130 cannot be supported.  That is, you did not measure or confirm how social participation is in early childhood education in classrooms of schools that promote inclusion.

Also it appears not all students answered all questions, so it is difficult to ascertain if the responses collected were indicative of the attitudes of the group as a whole or you were only able to collect answers to some of the question which might skew the individual items.  You provide no reasoning as to why this happened. 

In Table 4 you state (disregarding the number of unanswered items) – but why should we disregard these? You should have a total number for responses and then have two columns showing positive and negative responses. It is very difficult to assess the validity of your conclusions and discussion points if I do not know the ratio of questions answered.  For example for Item 11 you state 34 responded positively (only 40.5%) BUT how many actually answered the item overall?  I would like to see the ratios for each item. If you stick with 85 respondents then for every table I want to see the number who responded positively, negatively and did not respond.

Looking at Table 5 it appears you had data for 70 students and not 85 as stated.  Your participant numbers would then need to be amended. 

Overall, the way in which you have reported the results does not help a reader ascertain the full picture.  You either need to explain why some respondents did not answer all questions or justify the use of incomplete data sets.  If are able to do that then you need to indicate for the reader the ratios of responses for each item you report on (positive, negative, no response).  If you are unable to do that then you will need to review your data sets and remove all incomplete date and report in complete data sets only.

It may be there were good reasons for the inclusion of incomplete data but as you have not shown these ratios in your results a reader cannot fully discern the validity of your conclusions.

Author Response

Responses to reviewer 2 are sent in the attached document 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I would like to thank the authors for their thoughtful and thorough consideration of the feedback received.  The changes made and responses to queries were well conceived and articulated.  I look forward to reading your published manuscript, which is relevant and adds to the field of inclusive education research.