Exploring teacher self-efficacy for inclusive practices in three diverse countries

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explain teachers' perceived efficacy for teaching in inclusive classrooms by using a sample of 1911 in-service teachers from China, Finland, and South Africa. Bandura's theory of self-efficacy was used as a starting point to develop distinct models for each country. We found that in all countries, experience in teaching students with disabilities was the strongest predictor of self-efficacy, while the predictive power of other variables differed from country to country. Our findings illustrate ways to improve teacher education to respond better to the challenges set by the global inclusive education movement.

Introduction

The Inclusion of students with diverse educational needs into the mainstream is now one of the core global issues of education policy and planning (UNESCO, 2007). According to Kozleski, Artiles, Fletcher, and Engelbrecht (2009), the basic premise of inclusive education is that schools are about belonging, nurturing, and educating all students regardless of their differences in ability, culture, gender, language, class, and ethnicity. Schools and teachers therefore need to commit to the transformation of their school communities for the implementation of inclusive education to be successful.

In this study, the term inclusive practices refers for example to modifying the instruction and assessment according to students' needs, preventing and controlling disruptive student behaviour, and collaborating with parents and involving them in the school activities of their children. Notably, there is often nothing particularly special in these and other inclusive practices as they appear to be part of any good teaching. This general education nature of effective special educational interventions was earlier shown in a meta study of Forness (2001) and similar view is evident in more recent Mitchell's (2008) meta-analysis of over 2000 research articles on teaching students with special educational needs (SEN) at the primary and secondary school levels. His analysis shows that the majority of the most effective teaching methods are strategies that can well be applied in general education too.

With this background in mind, it is not that surprising that several influential reports and policy recommendation documents suggest that promoting inclusive practices in schools may also contribute to the learning outcomes of the entire school system. One main conclusion of the 2007 McKinsey report on the world's best performing school systems (Barber & Mourshed, 2007) was that the top educational systems try to ensure the best possible instruction for every child. In addition, the Program for International Student Assessment report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2011) highlights that many top performing schooling systems have also done well in including and educating potentially marginalised groups of students: for example, Finland has an extensive learning support system that is part of the mainstream education; Canada has systems in place for dealing with immigrant children; and in schools in Shanghai, China, have been rather successful in including migrant children coming from rural areas to the system.

While there is universality regarding the view that inclusive education is a fundamental way of realising quality education for all, there are clear differences in national educational policies. The international debate on the implementation of inclusive education and the development of inclusive schools has not fully considered how these policies, contexts, and cultures interact in the implementation of inclusive education within and across different countries (Kozleski et al., 2009). This necessitated an analysis that would shed light on the question of why, in spite of the official definitions of inclusion found in national policies, there is still only multiple and partial understanding of the inclusive education agenda within diverse contexts (Artiles & Dyson, 2005; Singh, 2009). Such an analysis can enable researchers to develop a deeper understanding of variations and similarities in the development of inclusive education while still acknowledging the role that unique cultural–historical contexts can play in this regard. This can lead to improved cross-cultural dialogue, as well as the promotion of new forms of partnerships and new modalities in the development of teacher education programmes on inclusive education (Crossley & Watson, 2003).

The development of inclusive education in mainland China, Finland, and South Africa, for example, has been influenced by international inclusion campaigns, such as the 1990 World Declaration on Education for All (UNESCO, 1990) and the 1994 Salamanca Statement (UNESCO, 1994) (Deng, 2009; Liu & Jiang, 2008; MOE, 2007, p. 11; Walton, 2011). Yet, due to their own unique historical, cultural, and social contexts, these countries have adopted rather dissimilar approaches to the implementation of inclusive education. The mainland Chinese model of inclusive education is often described with the following slogan: Special education schools as backbone, learning in regular classrooms and special classes as main body (CPG, 2011; Yang, 2011). Therefore, in China, the current aim is to educate the majority of children with special educational needs in regular schools while the special education schools are maintained as centres of expertise for supporting the work of regular schools and providing education for students with more profound special educational needs. To implement this dual strategy for dealing with SEN students, the Chinese government aims to not only develop inclusive mainstream education but also have at least one special school built in every town of more than 300 000 residents by 2020 (CPG, 2010).

In South Africa, legislation and policies concerning inclusive education have been formulated in the post-apartheid era. As a result, there has been a strong emphasis on equality and human rights issues in the country's constitution and the subsequent development of inclusive education (Engelbrecht, 2011; Walton, 2011). On the other hand, the move towards inclusive education has not often involved adequate support and training for the teachers, which has caused negative attitude and opposition to the implementation of inclusive education among South African teachers (Engelbrecht, 2006; Walton, 2011; Walton, Nel, Hugo, & Muller, 2009).

The Finnish approach to inclusive education can be described as pragmatic. To adopt, or not to adopt an inclusive approach to education, is often seen primarily as a pedagogical issue, and the human rights rhetoric in a long-established democratic society such as Finland is quite seldom used in Finnish discussions on inclusive education (Jahnukainen, 2011; Malinen & Savolainen, 2012). Another feature of the Finnish school system is the large proportion of special education teachers in all schools. These specialized teachers have had the main responsibility of running the extensive learning support services, which has led many mainstream educators to believe that teaching students identified as having special needs can only be done by teachers specifically trained for that purpose (Malinen, Väisänen, & Savolainen, 2012).

The global move towards more inclusive education has had implications for the research on teacher self-efficacy, and there is a growing body of research on teacher efficacy for inclusive education (e.g. Almog & Shechtman, 2007; Leyser, Zeiger, & Romi, 2011; Malinen, Savolainen, & Xu, 2012; Romi & Leyser, 2006; Soodak, Podell, & Lehman, 1998). The research questions of these studies have often dealt with issues such as the correlation between teachers' self-efficacy and their coping with behavioural problems or the effect of teacher self-efficacy on attitudes towards inclusive education.

The concept of self-efficacy was established by Bandura (1977) who has defined it as a judgement of the capability to execute a given type of performance (Bandura, 2006b). Self-efficacy is grounded in the social cognitive theory, which claims that people are able to exercise some control over their self-development and life circumstances even though many things depend at least partly on chance (Bandura, 2006a). In recent decades, teachers' efficacy beliefs have gained popularity as a topic of self-efficacy research, and Klassen, Tze, Betts, and Gordon (2011) report a strong increase in the quantity of teacher self-efficacy research published between the years 1986 and 2009. One potential reason behind the popularity of teacher self-efficacy research may be its cyclical nature: stronger self-efficacy beliefs are believed to result in greater efforts by teachers, which in turn leads to better performances, which again provides information for forming higher efficacy evaluations (Tschannen-Moran, Woolfolk Hoy, & Hoy, 1998).

Tschannen-Moran and Woolfolk Hoy (2007) remind researchers that teacher efficacy is context-specific. Teachers may feel efficacious about teaching certain subjects to certain students in certain settings, while perceiving themselves as less efficacious under different circumstances. The context-specific nature of teacher efficacy also makes it worthwhile to test the theoretical assumptions underlying self-efficacy in diverse cultural contexts and to use domain-specific research instruments that emphasise areas such as teaching science, teaching with technology, or like in the current study, teaching in inclusive settings (Klassen et al., 2011).

Research findings across various cultural contexts seem to indicate that teacher self-efficacy is a multidimensional construct. In different studies, teacher self-efficacy dimensions have often been related to instruction, classroom management, motivating and engaging students, and more recently, cooperating with colleagues and parents. The number of dimensions found has usually varied from three to six, possibly depending on the measurement instrument and the focus of the research (Chan, 2008a, 2008b; Klassen et al., 2009; Malinen, Savolainen, et al., 2012; Romi & Leyser, 2006; Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2007, 2010; Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2001, 2007).

Theoretically, self-efficacy is constructed from four main sources: mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasion, and somatic and emotional states (Bandura, 1977; Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2007). Vicarious experiences are gained when people observe someone else performing a certain task such as teaching in an inclusive classroom. Verbal persuasion is defined as interactions in which a teacher receives verbal comments about his or her capabilities to master given tasks. Somatic and emotional states have to do with the sense of anxiety or of excitement that can be interpreted as a sign of competence or incapability to master given activities. Any given influence that a person encounters may operate through one or more of the four sources of efficacy information. However, merely receiving information from these sources is not adequate for transforming efficacy beliefs. The information from different sources affects perceived self-efficacy only when it involves cognitive processing and reflective thinking (Bandura, 1997, p. 79).

From the four sources of self-efficacy, mastery experiences are commonly seen as the most powerful since they provide the most authentic evidence of whether one can do what it takes to succeed. Nevertheless, if people experience only easy success they may come to expect quick results and become quickly discouraged when they encounter difficulties. Gaining resilient self-efficacy beliefs requires people to experience and overcome obstacles though perseverant effort (Bandura, 1994, 1997, p. 80, 2012; Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2007).

It has been assumed that vicarious experiences, social persuasion, and somatic and emotional states would have a stronger impact on teacher self-efficacy of novice teachers who have little mastery experiences, while for experienced teachers, who have gained more mastery experiences, the other sources play a more minor role (Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2007). Experienced teachers' efficacy beliefs also appear to be quite resilient to change even when the teachers are exposed to new training (Tschannen-Moran et al., 1998). This assumption has gained support from Ross and Bruce (2007), who conducted a randomized study in which a professional development program had only a small positive effect in one teacher efficacy dimension, namely, classroom management, and no significant difference was observed between the treatment and control group in other dimensions, which were efficacy in engaging students and efficacy in using instructional strategies.

One obvious gap in the existing teacher efficacy literature according to Klassen et al. (2011) is the lack of quantitative, cross-national investigations on the sources of teacher self-efficacy. Klassen and others reviewed 218 studies about teacher efficacy from 1998 to 2009 and found only seven empirical studies investigating the sources of teacher efficacy. In addition, many of these studies were small qualitatively oriented case studies, so their results cannot be generalized to the wider teacher population. Their conclusion is that quantitatively oriented research on the sources of teacher efficacy is crucial for the advancement and practical usefulness of the field of teacher efficacy research. Furthermore, the number of cross-cultural investigations of teacher self-efficacy is currently very limited; for example, among the over 200 articles that Klassen and others reviewed, less than 3% included participants from multiple countries. Against this background, the current study, which investigates the role of different sources in forming teachers' self-efficacy beliefs by using large quantitative datasets from three continents, makes a considerable effort to fill the gap in the existing research literature. Even though countries are very different, investigating teacher self-efficacy can provide answers on how to implement inclusive education in very dissimilar contexts.

The current study aims to investigate and explain teacher self-efficacy for inclusive practices by using data collected from three diverse countries, China, Finland, and South Africa. These countries were chosen since they differ considerably in terms of history, culture, size, and the approaches they have adopted to inclusive education, and thus it is reasonable to expect some variation between the results from these three locations. As already mentioned, teacher self-efficacy is context dependent, and it is likely that different educational systems also pose dissimilar requirements for the work of teachers. Furthermore, as mentioned in the Introduction, cross-cultural studies such as this are able to highlight some features that seem remarkably similar across very different educational environments. Therefore, this study intends to add to existing research literature by collecting and analysing cross-cultural data to illustrate the interaction between the context and efficacy beliefs and to find ways to improve teacher education to respond better to the challenges set by the global inclusive education movement.

The current study had three aims:

• To test how a hypothetical model in which three dimensions of teacher self-efficacy for inclusive practices (instruction, behaviour management, and collaboration) are explained by four independent variables that represent different sources of self-efficacy, fits the data collected from Chinese, Finnish, and South African in-service teachers.

• To find out which teacher-related factors predict the self-efficacy of Chinese, Finnish, and South African teachers for inclusive practices.

• To analyse what differences can be found in the Chinese, Finnish, and South African predictive models and to suggest potential interpretations for the variations.