What Do Pre-Service Teachers Believe and Feel about Teaching Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)?

Background: Research on educating children with disabilities focuses on special education personnel.  However, there has been an impressive rise in the number of children with ASD in general education (GE) classrooms.  In 2004, there were 48,568 students with ASD in an inclusive setting.  Research about in-service and pre-service teachers’ inclusion attitudes toward children with special needs, broadly defined, has emerged from European and Australian education systems. Internationally, GE teachers feel unprepared and want training about ASD (Spears, Tollefson, & Simpson, 2001).  Less is known about U.S. pre-service GE teachers’ attitudes specific to ASD.  The limited research focuses on practicing teachers with varying training and experience. Further examination of teacher preparation is important given the increase in included students with ASD. 

Objectives: To determine factors associated with pre-service teachers’ (1) ASD-specific teaching efficacy and (2) attitudes toward inclusion of students with ASD.

Methods: Participants were 94 GE pre-service teachers (73 female) at a large university in the western U.S. (K-6 program: n = 28; 7-12 program: n = 65). Announcements were made during classes or through course emails.  Participants could complete a paper or online survey. Most participants were Caucasian (53%) or Asian-American (36%) with a median age of 24 years.  Measures tapped general teaching efficacy (i.e., Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale [Bandura, 1977]) and ASD-specific teaching efficacy (i.e, modified Teacher Efficacy Scale-Short Form [Hoy & Woolfolk, 1993]), professional development (scale created for this study), and perceptions regarding inclusion of students with ASD (i.e., Impact of Inclusion Questionnaire [Hastings & Oakford, 2003]). All scales had good internal reliability (a > 0.80).  Participants also provided information about whether or not they had experiences with ASD (personal, professional, and/or educational) and the number of months spent student teaching.

Results: (1) Pre-service teachers who felt more efficacious teaching children with ASD also expressed significantly greater positive attitudes toward inclusion (r =.535, p <.001), overall teaching efficacy (r =.469, p <.001), and had more experience with persons with ASD (r =.266, p =.010).

(2) Pre-service teachers who believed more strongly in inclusion also felt more efficacious teaching students with ASD (r =.535, p <.001) and reported higher likelihood of participating in future professional development (r =.210, p =.043).  However, more time spent student teaching was associated with more negative attitudes toward inclusion (r = -.209, p =.048).

Conclusions: The finding of less favorable attitudes to inclusion of students with ASD with more teaching experience replicates findings about disabilities from a decade ago (Soodak et al., 1998; Wilczenski, 1991).  However, unlike previous studies, participants in the current study were graduate level pre-service teachers. Perhaps these negative views stemmed from pre-service teachers’ observations of challenges faced by master teachers who lacked specialized training themselves and felt overwhelmed by the demands to meet the  instructional needs of both typically developing students and those with ASD. The hopeful finding that teaching efficacy is positively associated with inclusive beliefs, suggests that credential programs should provide greater training to equip teachers with the skills and confidence required to effectively teach diverse classrooms.