The Influence of the Emotionally Disturbed Classroom Label on General Education Teachers\u27 Sense of Efficacy

Students identified as “emotionally disturbed” face resistance to inclusion in classrooms with typically-developing peers on the part of the general education teachers. This study aims to address whether the classroom label of “emotionally disturbed” affects teacher efficacy and whether this relationship is moderated by the amount of applied inclusion training a teacher has received. General education teachers will read identical case studies of a student who either spends some of his school day in an “Emotionally Disturbed Class” or a “Self-Regulation Skills Class.” They will complete a measure of student-specific teacher efficacy and then report how many hours of inclusion training that involved direct interaction with students with emotional and behavioral difficulties they have had. An analysis of covariance is predicted to show higher reports of teacher efficacy in the “Self-Regulation Skills Class” condition than in the “Emotionally Disturbed Class” condition, and this relationship is expected to be even stronger as the amount of applied inclusion training increases