Ensuring an effective inclusive education of all students, irrespective of their background, is the strive of any school. Each school needs to learn ongoingly to improve and innovate its practices in this regard, as the learning needs of their diverse students are to be addressed in the most appropriate manner. This is an ongoing, transversal concern, irrespective of the country or of the cultural context.

Inclusive education involves providing educational opportunities to all students, regardless of disability or group, but valuing all aspects of human diversity. To achieve this desiderata, attitudinal, structural, relational and environmental changes are needed (Cologon & Mevawalla, 2018). Although the general meaning of the concept refers to all categories of students, in this study we narrow the meaning to the inclusion of students with disabilities in mainstream education.

One of the most researched topics in the field of inclusive education is the theme of teachers' attitude (Mieghem, Verschueren, Petry & Struyf, 2018). This is due, on the one hand, to the fact that the teachers’ influence on students' progress is one of the largest (Hattie, 2014, Mincu, 2015) and on the other hand, due to the fact that teachers are key social actors able to support quality and equity (Mincu, 2022). The teacher's attitude has a direct impact on his behavior in the classroom and indirectly affects the educational experience  the student with disabilities has in the school (Monsen, Ewing, & Kwoka, 2014). Thus, the research of teachers' attitude towards inclusive education is of crucial importance for finding the most suitable solutions to support teachers in planning and carrying out educational activities adapted to each student.

Attitude is defined as a "relatively durable and general evaluation of an object, person, group, problem or concept on a scale ranging from negative to positive" (Van den Bos, 2015, p.88). Attitude is defined by three components: cognitive, affective and behavioral (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993).  In this paper, we rely on the mentioned definitions.

Attitudes towards inclusive education have been investigated in countries across Europe and beyond. The most recent systematic literature review on this topic carried out on studies published between 2000 and 2020 highlights that the general attitude of teachers is a favorable one and that over the years it has progressed (Guillemot, Lacroix & Nocus, 2022).

The relationship between various factors and the way teachers see inclusive education has been investigated in different studies in Romania. They demonstrated that there is a link between teachers' stereotypes and inclusive education (Pachița & Gherguț, 2021), and between the perspectives that they have towards inclusive education (Marin, 2016). The aspects identified in these studies from Romania with regarding inclusive education, as well as recommendations on which they do, point to the need for more detailed research on this topic in Romania.

Our specific purpose is to establish whether Romanian teachers are in favor of inclusion or not. We also want to investigate how the attitude towards inclusive education differs according to factors such as professional training in the field of inclusive education, experience in education, the level of education at which he/she teaches, previous experience in including students with SEN.

The research was carried out on a group of 1038 pre-university teachers from all levels of education. The research was conducted online. The questionnaires were sent to schools and regional school centers in the country to be completed between October 1 - 17, 2022. To identify their attitudes towards inclusive education was used ‘The Multidimensional Attitudes toward Inclusive Education Scale’ (MATIES) (Mahat, 2008). This scale was chosen because it follows the definition approached by us in the research and evaluates attitudes on three dimensions: cognitive, affective and behavioral with 6 items on each dimension. The response is measured on a Likert scale from 1 to 6 in which 1 means strongly disagree and 6 means agree strong. The scale has good internal consistency for all the three dimensions: for the cognitive Cronbach alpha= 0.77, for the affective one, cronbach alpha =0.78, and for the behavioral one, cronbach alpha =0.91 (Mahat, 2008). The MATIES scale has been used so far both in the European space (Desombre, Delaval & Jury, 2021), as well as in that of the United States (Barnes & Gaines, 2015), in the African one (Butakor, Ampadu, Suleiman, 2018) and in Asia (Jun et al, 2022, Hassanein, Alshaboul & Ibrahim, 2021), and showed both the direction teachers' attitudes, as well as influencing factors of their attitude. The scale was translated by the reverse translation method and culturaly adapted for the Romanian space, obtaining an internal consistency similar to the original scale: for the cognitive Cronbach alpha = 0.78, for the affective one, cronbach alpha =0.83, and for the behavioral one, cronbach alpha =0.90. Also, the participants completed a questionnaire with demographic data regarding gender, experience in education, level of education at which they teach, training in inclusive education, previous experience in activities with students with SEN, the presence of a student with SEN among the people close to them. The collected data will be statistically analyzed to identify the averages and correlations between the investigated factors and the attitude of the teachers.

The attitude of teachers plays an important role in achieving the goal of inclusive education. In this perspective, the purpose of the present study was to identify whether Romanian teachers have favorable attitudes or not towards inclusive education. The preliminary results show that Romanian teachers have favorable attitudes, and one of the most important factors influencing their attitude is extent of dedicated training they have for inclusive education. On the second place comes the infrastructure of support the benefit from once attempting to include students with SEN in their classroom. Another purpose of the present study was to investigate how the attitude towards inclusive education differs according to factors such as professional training in the field of inclusive education, experience in education, the level of education at which he teaches, previous experience in including students with SEN. For this, we carry out the statistical analyzes to identify the correlations between the factors investigated with the help of the questionnaire with demographic data and the scores obtained on the MATIES scale on each dimension and in general. Likewise, the averages obtained on the MATIES scale for each factor will be compared to identify whether those with more experience have more favorable attitudes or not. These analyzes will be performed for all the factors considered. Following the analysis, we expect to identify the factors that most influence the teachers' attitude and the demographic characteristics of the teachers who reported more favorable attitudes. It is still a work in progress.

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