Many changes have been made in education policy throughout the last two decades, particularly in the area of special education. With new legislature in place including No Child Left Behind, teachers are faced with a variety of difficult challenges, such as meeting AYP and preparing students for tests on an annual basis, doing so with fewer dollars at their disposal, more students per classroom, and increased expectations for professional development. Many teachers enter the field unaware of the nature of the demands that have been placed on them. Students enter the field of teaching at the college level with many idealistic notions of what they are going to be able to accomplish, and occasionally are disappointed when they are faced with reality.
One of the areas that has endured the greatest shift in policy and in practice is the education of students with disabilities. The process of educating students with disabilities has shifted across the spectrum- from the fight for rights to education in the 70s to inclusion in the 00s, the issue of students with special needs in the general education classroom has been hotly debated. Teachers today are expected to support and facilitate inclusion when they arrive to their first classroom, however many new teachers do not know what the term means or what implications it has for their career.
The ability of teachers to carry out the tasks that teaching requires is imperative to the success of teaching and student achievement. This study addresses one of the most basic issues regarding this ability. Teachers' perceived efficacy to complete the tasks they are required to do is known as teacher self-efficacy, and plays a critical role in the formation of teacher beliefs and also for the outcomes of their work. This study seeks to create a scale to effectively measure teacher self-efficacy for teaching students with disabilities. The Teaching Students with Disabilities Efficacy Scale (TSDES) contains 14 items specifically written to measure these beliefs. The scale was administered to 245 students of education at a large Midwestern university along with the Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale (TSES) created by Tschannen-Moran and Woolfolk Hoy (2001).
Results reveal important findings for special education and teacher education. First, preservice teachers do not conceptualize teaching in the same ways as inservice teachers. Instead of conceptualizing the different aspects of teaching, results indicate that preservice teachers consider all teaching tasks to be the same general construct. This reveals a naivety on the part of preservice teachers regarding the true nature of teaching. Teacher education programs should address this. Additionally, preservice teacher efficacy for teaching students with disabilities is significantly lower than preservice teacher efficacy for teaching the general population. Finally, the
construction of the TSDES was found to be reliable and valid, indicating that the
scale is an accurate and helpful tool for the measurement of teacher efficacy for teaching students with disabilities.