Background/Purpose While some school districts offer direct adapted physical education (APE) for students who are unable to participate successfully in the general physical education (GPE) setting, other districts opt to provide only consultation services. The purpose of this study is to determine what effect the type of APE service model has on GPE teachers' efficacy when working with students with disabilities.
Method Participants in the survey were 102 Elementary GPE teachers with two or more years of experience. The instrumentation used is a 29-item questionnaire. The questionnaire was developed by the author based on recommendations of APE practices and expectations in the Adapted Physical Education Manual of Best Practices 2nd Edition (Sillman-French, 2008). The questionnaire used a 7-point Likert scale from 1 (not confident) to 7 (very confident) that best described the GPE teachers perceived level of confidence when working with students with disabilities in the GPE class with the various service delivery models.
Analysis/Results Results indicated that there were significant differences between levels of service, Consult (F (3,98) = 5.09, p = .003), Itinerant (F (3, 97) = 10.80, p = .000), Collaborative (F (3,98) = 13.64, p = .000). As well, the results indicated that the collaborative method produced the highest level of efficacy in the participants (F (3,303) = 19.09, p = .000).
Conclusions The study indicated that the collaborative model of APE service support might be the most effective in increasing GPE teacher efficacy when working with children with disabilities.