Research On Empathy Of Special Education Teachers And Its Influential Factors

Teachers' empathy is an ability of considering the issues from the standpoint of the students,puting themselves to think of their feelings and thoughts, which adjust their teaching methods to guide students in the academic and emotional aspects to grow. The aims of this research are acquaintancing the special education teachers' empathy ability analyzing the factors which would affect the teachers'empathy and providing advices for teachers to promote the level of empathy.The subjects include 246 teachers of 9 special schools in Shanghai.The research uses several education science research methods to collect the data such as literature, interview and questionnaire, and uses descriptive statistics, variance analysis, regression analysis and correlation analysis to analyse the data. The results show that:1.The questionnaire is made up of empathic concern,personal distress,fantasy and perspective taking.2.Special Education Teachers generally have a high level of empathy.3.The characteristics of special school teachers' empathy in Shanghai are:female teachers lead a higher score than male teachers on empathic concern; the teachers who were shifting from General Education System are scoring lower than control groups; but with age, seniority, educational level, school type and so on, special school teachers show no significant differences.4.Family relationships, psychoticism of personality and self-esteem would significantly influence special school teachers' empathy.