Education for all in action: Measuring teachers’ competences for inclusive education

Limitations While this instrument is able to grasp teachers’ beliefs for inclusive education as well as a self- assessment of their skills, it remains to be seen how the DISCO-instrument connects to other aspects of competency such as knowledge and actual classroom behaviour. Furthermore, the validation-process in this study remains largely focused on structural validity, while it has been argued that a full validation-process should encompass a.o. the stability of the instrument, as well as concurrent, discriminant and criterion-related validity [66]. Especially a cross-national comparison could give us some interesting insights into how contexts, with their specific edu- cational realities and policies, shape teachers’ thinking and competences on inclusive educa- tion. Similarly, it would be interesting to explore to what extent respondents report different beliefs and self-efficacy scores depending on their own intersectional positions. We were unable to explore this as our data did not include demographic information beyond respon- dents’ age, gender and educational background. However, it stands to reason that our sample included few voices from minoritized groups as the Flemish teaching population tends to con- sist overwhelmingly of white, middle class, cisgender, straight, able-bodied women, with for instance only 3.2% of the teaching population being of ethnic minority descent [67]. Lastly, we suggest that mixed method or qualitative methods might be interesting to further understand the processes underlying teachers’ answers to the DISCO-survey and hence their

beliefs and self-efficacy assessments regarding inclusive education. For instance, future research, could use think-aloud procedures to gain a deeper insight into how teachers think about specific features of inclusive classrooms, including how they assess the importance of noticing diversity or their ambiguous stance regarding professionals beliefs versus policy aimed at low-SES students. Author Contributions Conceptualization: Wendelien Vantieghem, Iris Roose, Karin Goosen, Piet Van Avermaet. Data curation: Wouter Schelfhout. Formal analysis: Wendelien Vantieghem. Investigation: Wendelien Vantieghem, Iris Roose, Piet Van Avermaet. Methodology: Wendelien Vantieghem, Karin Goosen. Supervision: Piet Van Avermaet. Writing – original draft: Wendelien Vantieghem. Writing – review & editing: Wendelien Vantieghem, Iris Roose, Wouter Schelfhout. References 1. Banks J, Cochran-Smith M, Moll L, Richert A, Zeichner K, LePage P, et al. Teaching diverse learners. In: Darling-Hammond L, Bransford J, editors. Preparing teachers for a changing world: What teachers should learn and be able to do. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons; 2007. p. 232–74. 2. Forghani-Arani N, Cerna L, Bannon M. The lives of teachers in diverse classrooms. OECD Education Working Papers. 2019; 198. https://doi.org/10.1787/8c26fee5-en. 3. Burns T, Shadoina-Gersing V. Educating teachers for diversity: meeting the challenge: Paris: OECD; 2010. 4. Van Mieghem A, Verschueren K, Petry K, Struyf E. An analysis of research on inclusive education: a

systematic search and meta review. International Journal of Inclusive Education. 2020; 24(6):675–89. 5. Opertti R, Walker Z, Zhang Y. Inclusive education: From targeting groups and schools to achieving quality education as the core of EFA. In: Florian L, editor. The SAGE Handbook of Special Education. London: Sage; 2014. p. 149–69. PLOS ONE Measuring teachers’ competences for inclusive education PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291033 November 8, 2023 19 / 22