With an increasing number of students with special educational needs (SEN) attending inclusive education in regular classes the preparation of pre-service teachers for this relatively new task is crucial. The European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education (2011; 2012) focuses on the two components ‘positive teacher attitudes’ and ‘effective teacher skills’, which results in a profile for inclusive teachers containing of four key values with several areas of competence per key value.

When we want to evaluate how good pre-service teachers are prepared for the task of inclusive education we have find a framework to operate with. From psychology research we know that success in solving any task is influenced by the person’s self-efficacy (Bandura, 1992, 1997, 2001; Schunk, 1995). This general finding can be confirmed for teaching practice as well (Schwarzer & Warner, 2011). As self-efficacy we describe the “personal certainty to be able to handle new or difficult demand situations due to own competence” (Schwarzer & Warner, 2011, own translation). The impact of self-efficacy on doing inclusive education seems to be crucial (Sharma, Loreman, & Forlin, 2012; Tschannen-Moran, Woolfolk-Hoy, & Hoy, 1998).

Since we know that specific self-efficacy is not only influenced by learned skills and competence but also by generalized self-efficacy and furthermore by beliefs about the specific demand situation, we have to consider beliefs about inclusive education for teacher education. In a multi-component model of attitudes (Zanna & Rempel, 1988), ‘beliefs’ can be seen as the cognitive component of attitudes: How we evaluate a object is influenced by expectations we have on this object. Those expectations and thoughts are called beliefs (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975) and have a great influence on our attitudes and our behavior (Maio & Haddock, 2010). But as we know from research, it is quite difficult or maybe not possible to change beliefs about inclusive education by teacher education courses (Kopp, 2009).

The main goal of our research project is to find out, how a longer phase of practical experience in inclusive education can change both components: self-efficacy with regards to inclusive education and beliefs about inclusive education. Our hypothesis is: “Student teachers in special education who do their practical part of teacher education in inclusive classes will develop higher self-efficacy and more positive beliefs about inclusive education than those who do it in a special school only.”

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