The inclusion of students with disabilities in general physical education (GPE) classes has become a philosophy and practice that is expected if not always understood. A review of inclusion in physical education literature suggested that GPE teachers possess less than favorable feelings towards the inclusion of students with disabilities in their classroom (Block & Obrusnikova, 2007). In order to provide teacher-training programs that support inclusive instruction, a closer look into understanding teacher’s inclusion behaviors is warranted. The purpose of this project was to identify potential factors affecting GPE teachers’ inclusive behaviors towards students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) based upon an integration of two theoretical perspectives, self-efficacy theory (SET) and theory of planned behavior (TPB).
Method:
Participants were 151 general physical education teachers from a national random sample whom submitted surveys anonymously online. A stratified random sampling procedure was employed where, in effort to account for geographic regions, two states from each of the six AAHPERD regions were randomly selected. Schools from the selected states were randomly sampled from the National Center on Education Statistics school search website. GPE teachers’ beliefs, intentions, and behaviors to include students with ASD in their class were surveyed using a modified version of instruments previously developed by Jeong and Block (2011) and Taliaferro and colleagues (2011).
Analysis/Results:
Results from a hierarchical regression analysis with SET entered into the first step followed by TPB indicated that self-efficacy explained 3.4% of the variance in behavior and the addition of TPB increased the variance explained to 5.3%. However, an examination of individual beta coefficients suggested that SET was the only significant predictor of behavior. The results of this study do not support the use of the integrative framework using both SET and TPB for predicting teachers’ inclusion behavior.
Conclusions:
Although the proposed integrative framework was not supported for predicting inclusion behavior, results did provide a unique glimpse into what teachers’ are faced with in terms of numbers of students, support from other professionals, training, as well as personal confidence. While teacher education appears to be a significant predictor of inclusion behaviors, questions remain as to what kind of training is most successful at preparing teachers’ to include students with disabilities. Future research should look not only into teacher education programs, but also into student-level behaviors (i.e. physical activity and engagement) in effort to establish evidence of best practices in teacher education.