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

teachers, and not just those teaching specific courses or students; and had to refer to actions pertaining to day-to-day teaching activities in order to reflect the continuous nature of work- ing on inclusion. For the wording of the items, the brainstorm was based on an existing reflec- tion-instrument for how teachers address diversity in the classroom, and validated scales on ethnocentrism, homonegativity, differentiation, collaboration, and teaching efficacy. In order to ensure content validity and readability, these items were then adapted based on feedback by two academics in the field of diversity and (teacher) education, two in-service teacher educa- tors specialized in teacher professional development for diversity, and two teachers. Through this process, the questionnaire ended up consisting of 128 items, which were then presented in the first step of the research to a large-scale group of pre-service teachers. The questionnaire was administered in Dutch, the official language of Flanders. The questionnaire. The questionnaire consists of two parts. Part one considers teachers’ beliefs by answering on a 7-point Likert scale (0 = completely disagree, 6 = completely agree) to allow for nuanced answers, in line with psychometric recommendations for Likert-scales [49]. Furthermore, given that inclusive teaching has become an obligatory professional competence, and hence a norm in education, this increased the chance of social desirability bias and ceiling effects in respondents’ answers [50]. To counteract this, we provided respondents with a large

range of items that were critical of inclusion or student diversity, and hence, were reverse-coded. The first component taps teachers’ professional beliefs on diversity, specifically with regards to students with ethnic minority background (e.g., “The more immigrant students in a school, the more discipline problems the school will face”), with a disability (e.g., “Students with a disability reduce the learning opportunities for the other students in the class”), from lower socio-economic backgrounds (e.g., “underprivileged parents are often less interested in their children’s progress in school than other parents”), with regards to essentialist notions on the gender binary (e.g., “I think it’s good that girls are not asked to help out with jobs in school that involve heavy lifting”), and LGB-students (e.g., “many students experiment with their sexuality just to get noticed”). The second component consists of responsibility-beliefs, and is divided in two sections. The first one taps the extent to which teachers believe it is the responsibility of the educational field to create maximal developmental opportunities for diverse students. These 33 items con- sider general items (e.g., “Teachers have a didactical task in the classroom, not one of raising students or caring for them.”) as well as with regards to specific groups of students (e.g., “The school must allow students with a migration background to speak a language other than Dutch at school”, “it is time to pay attention to LGB-sexuality in several parts of the curriculum”).

The second section taps teachers’ perceptions of to what extent they should collaborate with both diverse parents and colleagues. These 16 items are preceded by the stem “It is my job to. . .” followed by, for instance, “Establish a good relationship with all parents, even if I do not like them” or “learn from colleagues with a completely different teaching approach”. The second part of the questionnaire contains 42 items considering self-efficacy, consisting of three dimensions. In line with other validated efficacy scales [51,52], these items are pre- ceded by the stem “To what extent are you able to. . .” and is answered on a 9-point Likert scale (0 = not at all, 8 = a lot). The first dimension contains 9 items tapping teachers’ percep- tions of being able to notice student diversity (f.i., students’ background, interests, well-being, . . .) with, for instance, “make time for in-depth individual conversations with all of your stu- dents in order to provide more effective support”. The second dimension taps the extent to which teachers feel capable to design a classroom environment that takes into account the needs of their students and contains 21 items (e.g., “Give students opportunities beyond tradi- tional tests and exams to demonstrate their knowledge and skills”). The third dimension mea- sures the extent to which teachers feel capable to create positive interactions among students through 12 items (e.g., “Coach students to treat other opinions with respect.”). PLOS ONE Measuring teachers’ competences for inclusive education

PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291033 November 8, 2023 6 / 22