The influence of a course in inclusive education on changing pre-service teachers’ readiness to work with students with SEN

Abstract

Understanding teachers’ perspective towards inclusive education is seen as a decisive factor in making schools more inclusive. Given the increasing need to prepare pre-service teachers to face inclusion in the classroom as soon as they enter the teaching career, we consider appropriate to assess to which extend can a training course have an impact on the level of pre-service teachers to teach in inclusive classrooms. In this respect, final year students from Education Science degree that finalized a study course on the topic of inclusive education were invited to participate into this research by filling in a questionnaire based on the teacher efficacy for inclusive practices (TEIP) scale. Results show that even after taking a relatively short training course, it can bring about some statistically significant changes in pre-service teachers’ knowledge, attitudes and confidence level towards inclusion. Pre-service teachers that have participated to this study are generally in favor of going through training courses to acquire a special set of skills to thereby be able to work in an inclusive learning environment.