The Contribution of Special Education Students’ Clinical Work to their Sense of Self Efficacy: A Preliminary Research

AbstractOranim Academic College runs a unique teacher education program for special education. Many resources are invested in the clinic in order to create skilled and professional teachers. As a consequence of the intensive work we hypothesized that at the end of the year, students’ sense of self efficacy as special education teachers would be higher, relative to the beginning of the year. In order to investigate this question a quantitative preliminary research was conducted in which a questionnaire was administered at the beginning and at the end of the academic year to 3rdyear students participating in the clinic (n=63). Findings indicated that a significant difference in student teachers’ sense of self efficacy as teachers before and after participation in the clinic was not found. This finding may be due to ceiling effect. An additional explanation is that the students’ feelings that they could advance their pupils was reduced as the children's’ advance in the clinic was not expressed in a notable enough way in their home class These findings raise important questions regarding the training of special education teachers. Future research will investigate if, after experiencing a year's work as special education teachers, the clinic's contribution to self-efficacy will be more obvious