Calculating overall subsidies for special education by acquiring information from individual students

Abstract

The ideal of public education is to provide each student with equal opportunity to effectively learn what he or she needs to learn. However, because students are born unequally, additional resources should be allocated for assisting students with learning disadvantages. In order to gain a more accurate understanding of the actual needs of different types of special education students, questionnaires were delivered to 840 students in 280 classes in various parts of Taiwan. The main difference between this research and previous studies in the world is that in this study the students themselves are taken as the sample population, each providing responses with assistance from their teachers, so that the data gained from each questionnaire represents an individual student's unique needs. The overall weighting calculated from this new method of research is 2.20, which is similar to the results of many studies that were using different approaches.