During the past few years, the adoption of inclusive policies to educate children with additional support needs became an almost worldwide trend. One key factor for successful school inclusion is an enabling social environment, which includes the predominance of positive attitudes regarding students who have disabilities (Pijl, Meijer, & Hegarty, 1997). Within inclusive contexts, children without disabilities have multiple opportunities to interact with their peers with disabilities (Favazza et al., 2000). However, research data show that, unless given encouragement by adults, typically developing peers (TDP) commonly do not establish spontaneous interactions with children with disabilities (Frea, Craig-Unkefer, Odom, & Johnson, 1999). Negative attitudes are associated with an increased risk for social exclusion and bullying experienced by children with disabilities (Tavares, 2011). Furthermore, these children seem unmotivated for learning and they report feelings of being lonely and isolated in their classes (Tavares, 2011).

To address this issue, several initiatives have been taken to modify TDP’s attitudes towards their peers with disabilities through the implementation of disability awareness programmes (e.g., Ison et al., 2010). The premise for developing disability awareness programmes is that negative attitudes stem from the lack of experience and knowledge about disability (Ajzen, 2005). By intervening to increase knowledge and perceptions of disabilities it is expected that TDP’s attitudes may be improved, favouring, as a parallel effect, the participation of students with disabilities in educational contexts (King et al., 2003). Common elements of interventions include breaking down stereotypes and raising awareness of the challenges encountered by people with disabilities in everyday living (Lindsay & Edwards, 2013).

Disability awareness programmes can assume different structures and forms to promote changes in attitudes – demonstrating different levels of empirical support – in terms of the strategies and techniques used, the population addressed, the data analyses carried out and the evaluation methods used. A systematic review of 63 studies in this area found that contact with people with disabilities is the most often used technique to promote attitudinal changes (García et al., 2009). However, interventions based on “contact” strategies must fulfil basic conditions, such as the participation of children with and without disabilities in joint and non-competitive activities with pursuance of common goals (Allport, 1954). Research has evaluated other types of interventions based on providing information and knowledge about disabilities (e.g. Tavares, 2011) and on facilitating opportunities to experience challenges imposed to children with disabilities during daily routines through simulation techniques (Hurst et al., 2012). These interventions generally obtain good results, notwithstanding some authors describing that the use of these techniques alone does not result in attitude change (e.g. Krahé & Altwasser, 2006). A combined approach merging the promotion of positive contact experiences with the provision of information and knowledge about disabilities seems to receive more empirical support (Lindsay & Edwards, 2013). Further to the type of intervention, methods used to evaluate programmes’ effectiveness have been under debate, with recommendations to complement information collected through self-report measures with behavioural observations of children interactions in order to determine to which extent attitudes translate into actual behaviour (e.g. Martinez & Carspecken, 2007).

Our study evaluates whether a multi-component disability awareness programme is effective at promoting positive attitudes of typically developing students towards their peers with disabilities.

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