The increasing digitalisation of education systems and the legally anchored requirement for inclusive education place high demands on teachers. Studies such as those by Fichtner et al. (2023) indicate that digitalisation constitutes one of the central challenges for the further development of schools and teaching. At the same time, the second periodic review of Germany under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD, 2023) highlights substantial deficits in the implementation of inclusive education.

Inclusion and digitalisation therefore need to be addressed jointly in classroom practice, as digital media can enable individualised learning pathways and may support the consideration of diverse learning prerequisites. Moreover, digital tools are discussed in the literature as offering significant potential to reduce barriers and promote participation for all students (e.g. Fichtner et al., 2023).

The successful implementation of inclusive digital teaching largely depends on teachers, who play a central role in creating learning environments that are both inclusive and digitally supported. In this context, pre-service teachers are of particular importance. As future educators, they play a key role in shaping future educational practice and institutional development with regard to accessibility and participation for all learners (Martin, 2020; Schröder & Schulz, 2024). To enable the effective realisation of inclusive digital teaching, pre-service teachers must be comprehensively prepared through appropriate training opportunities at universities and teacher education institutions (Böttinger & Schulz, 2023).

Conceptually, the study is situated within competence-oriented approaches to teacher professionalisation and research on inclusive pedagogy and digital competence development in teacher education. While numerous studies address either digital transformation or inclusive education in isolation, there is still a lack of systematic analyses examining how these two demands can be integrated within teacher education programmes (e.g. Beier & Czaja, 2023). In addition, there is limited research on how training programmes need to be designed in order to prepare students effectively, as implementation practices are often shaped individually by the respective institutions.

To address existing research gaps in the field of inclusive digital teacher professionalisation, a scoping review based on a systematic search strategy is conducted (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005; Newman & Gough, 2020). The aim of the review is to identify existing approaches to inclusive digital teacher education and to examine how these approaches are designed in practice. By jointly considering normative principles and empirical evidence, the review seeks to generate both theoretical and practical insights into the design of teacher education programmes. Particular attention is given to empirical studies that evaluate existing training offers and report effects, while conceptual contributions are analysed separately to map the field of programme designs.

The review addresses the following research questions:

1. Which training concepts for the inclusive digital professionalisation of pre-service teachers exist in German-speaking countries?
2. How are these concepts designed? And what evaluation results have been reported?

Overall, this review provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of research on inclusive digital teacher education in German-speaking contexts and offers valuable insights for the further development of pre-service teacher education programmes in an international and comparative perspective.

The scoping review followed a systematic and transparent search strategy across several databases hosted by EBSCOhost (e.g. ERIC) as well as additional international databases. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were defined a priori and documented before the search process. For collaborative work on the review, the software Covidence was used, which structures the review process in accordance with the PRISMA guidelines (Page et al., 2021). The PRISMA framework ensures transparent and reproducible reporting, while the use of Covidence increases the efficiency of the literature selection process and enhances the reproducibility of the findings. The database search yielded a total of 11,290 publications (APA PsycArticles: 6,795; APA PsycInfo: 2,249; ERIC: 229; FIS Bildung: 1,390; PSYNDEX: 28; Google Scholar [English and German]: 599), of which 93 duplicates were removed. Google Scholar results were screened using predefined search strings and predefined screening limits. The present contribution focuses exclusively on studies from the German-speaking countries (DACH region) and on the first phase of teacher education. The following inclusion criteria were applied: • intervention (e.g. seminars) within teacher education programmes, • target group: pre-service teachers, • digital content, • inclusive content, • type of publication: all empirical study designs (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods) as well as theoretically and conceptually oriented articles, which were coded and analysed in separate analytic strands, • location of studies: Germany, Austria, or Switzerland (DACH). Out of the 11,290 identified studies, 35 studies met the inclusion criteria and were therefore included in and analysed as part of this review, following a multi-stage screening process (title/abstract and full-text screening).

All 35 analysed studies originated from Germany; no studies conducted in Switzerland or Austria that met the predefined inclusion criteria were identified. This geographical concentration suggests that research activity in this field is currently primarily embedded in the German teacher education context, while comparable systematic investigations in other German-speaking countries appear limited or not yet sufficiently documented in indexed literature. It is also noteworthy that the majority of the studies were published from around 2020 onwards. This points to a recent and increasing scholarly engagement with inclusive digital teacher education, possibly related to policy reforms, curricular developments, and broader digital transformation processes in education. A further central finding is that most identified concepts have not been empirically evaluated and are based primarily on theoretical or conceptual programme descriptions. Where training formats were examined empirically, many studies relied on relatively small samples, which limits robustness and generalisability of the reported effects. Follow-up measurements were only rarely conducted. As a result, the long-term effects of the examined interventions cannot be reliably determined, which restricts conclusions regarding sustainability and transferability. Instead, short-term outcome measures predominated, typically focusing on immediate self-reported competence gains or attitudinal changes. With regard to format and implementation, most interventions consisted of seminar-based or workshop-based approaches, frequently embedded within time-limited projects. These offers were often not permanently integrated into the formal structures of teacher education programmes. While project-based implementations can foster innovation and experimentation, they are only partly suitable for long-term institutional anchoring and curricular continuity. From a teacher education perspective, more systematic and structurally embedded integration of inclusive digital content appears necessary to support sustainable competence development. Overall, the findings indicate a growing but still fragmented evidence base and highlight the need for larger-scale, longitudinal, and structurally embedded research designs, both within German-speaking contexts and in broader international comparison.

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