A comparison of Australian and Swiss secondary school teachers’ attitudes, concerns, self-efficacy, and intentions to teach in inclusive classrooms: does the context matter?

ABSTRACT

The study examines attitudes, concerns, self-efficacy, and intentions of secondary school teachers from Australia (n = 140) and Switzerland (n = 221) to teach in inclusive classrooms. Australian educators had more positive attitudes towards inclusion, fewer concerns and higher self-efficacy to teach inclusively when compared to their Swiss counterparts. Further, the authors found that Australian teachers had significantly more positive intentions to teach in inclusive classrooms when compared to their Swiss counterparts. Considering intentions to enact a behaviour play an important role in the actual enactment of the behaviour, (Ajzen 1991) it was important to determine if predictors of participants’ intentions differed in Australia and Switzerland. Overall, Swiss teachers’ intentions to teach in inclusive classrooms were more strongly influenced by the variables of attitudes, concerns and self-efficacy than those of the Australian teachers. All three variables predicted Swiss participants intention scores, while two (i.e. attitudes and self-efficacy scores) predicted Australian educators’ intention scores. The researchers examine the variability of policy reforms and teacher education programmes as a potential explanation for the differences in these two countries and discuss implications of our findings for both these and other countries implementing inclusive education reforms.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusion
• teacher-attitudes
• concerns
• self-efficacy
• cross-country comparison
• intentions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Caroline Sahli Lozano

Prof. Dr. Caroline Sahli Lozano is head of the research programme 'Inclusive Education' at the Institute for Research, Development and Evaluation at the University of Teacher Education in Bern, Switzerland (PHBern). She is also a lecturer at various institutes of the PHBern and at other Swiss universities. She has worked as a special needs educator in integrative and separative school settings. For around 20 years she has been conducting research on topics of school integration/inclusion and educational inequalities and has accompanied various schools in development processes towards inclusion.

Umesh Sharma

Prof. Dr. Umesh Sharma is Professor and Associate Dean (Equity and Inclusion) at the Faculty of Education at Monash University in Melbourne. He is head of the Department of Educational Psychology and Inclusive and Special Education. He advises ministries of education in many countries in the Asia-Pacific region on how to implement inclusive education in regular schools.

Sergej Wüthrich

Dr. Sergej Wüthrich is a scientific collaborator in the research programme Inclusive Education at the Institute for Research, Development and Evaluation at the University of Teacher Education in Bern. He also works as a lecturer at the Institute for Special Needs Education.