Understanding what drives teachers to adopt inclusive practices is crucial for promoting equal educational opportunities for all students. Attitudes toward inclusive education and self-efficacy in using inclusive practices have been identified as important factors in this regard (e.g., Hellmich et al., 2019; Opoku et al., 2021; Sahli Lozano et al., 2021; Sharma et al., 2018). However, there exists considerable variability in their relative importance across studies and teacher samples, with teacher attitudes being sometimes less (e.g., Opoku et al., 2021) or more important than teacher self-efficacy (Hellmich et al., 2019; Sharma et al., 2018), and with diverging patterns across countries (Sahli Lozano et al., 2021). Country-specific differences (e.g., in school systems and in history, legislation and implementation of inclusive education) are used to explain such differences. But such interpretations must be taken with caution because of methodological issues (Davidov, et.al, 2014). This study is the first to systematically investigate the role of teacher attitudes and self-efficacy in the prediction of teachers’ intention to teach in inclusive classrooms across teacher samples from five different countries (Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Greece, and Canada; total N = 1207 teachers), while taking measurement invariance of the measured constructs into account. The results indicate that across all five countries, self-efficacy in collaboration is the most important and consistent predictor of teachers' intentions to teach in inclusive classrooms. This points to the importance of collaboration, a construct closely aligned to collective efficacy and commitment, across different country contexts. This further highlights the importance of enhancing collaboration within the school community which can lead to better inclusion in schools. In contrast, significant differences across countries were found regarding the role of attitudes toward inclusion. Accordingly, three important insights of this study are: 1) despite different national contexts, self-efficacy in collaboration is the most consistent and strongest predictor of teacher intentions’, 2) considering domain-specific aspects in teacher self-efficacy is important in the prediction of teacher intentions’, and 3) teacher attitudes seem more central in some countries than in others. Potential factors (e.g., the level of support provided to teachers in implementing inclusive practices or teacher training) that may explain these common and differential patterns across the five national contexts will be discussed.

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