Special Education Teachers’ Knowledge about Genetic Disorders

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to determine the knowledge level of the special education teachers about genetic disorders. A total of 83 teachers’ from working on special education centers were used. Knowledge of cell division was the highest among participants (33.7%). However, majority of the participants specified that they had no information about genetic counselling (80.7%), prenatal genetic diagnosis (79.5%), polygenic inheritance (72.3%), mitochondrial inheritance (71.1%), autosomal dominant and recessive genes (65.1% and 63,9% respectively). The majority of the participants were mostly aware of Down syndrome (69.9%) followed by Rh factor (31.3%), diabetes (27.7%), muscular dystrophy (24.1%) and albinism (24.1%). Our results showed that the majority of respondents were lack of adequately enough genetic knowledge.