This article investigates the relationship between the achievement level of students in classes and the presence of students identified as having special needs in inclusive settings. In particular, it examines whether the presence of students with special educational needs in inclusive classrooms has an effect on the national mathematics standards achievement of their fellow students. In order to do so, the national standard scores of approximately 75,000 fourth graders in mathematics were used as dependent variable in multi-level regression modelling. As independent variables at class level the number of students with special needs and at the individual level socioeconomic , cultural and ethnic background variables were used together with gender and age. Results show only a very small effect of the presence of students with special needs on the national mathematics standard scores of their classmates. The effect can be either positive or negative depending on further class conditions.
The idea of inclusion in the sense of participatory access to educational opportunities is widely acknowledged and implemented within the pedagogical discourse. Nevertheless, ensuring social participation of students with and without special education needs in learning situations continues to be challenging. The present study examines promoting and hindering factors for social inclusion with a focus on students with special educational needs. Therefore, semi-structured interviews regarding students’ (n = 12 students with SEN, 12 students without SEN), parents’ (n = 24), and teachers’ (n = 6 regular teachers, 6 special need teachers) perceptions of promoting educational characteristics that might influence students’ inclusion in everyday school life are analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings provide a wide range of pedagogical interventions that have the potential to promote inclusive education processes on educational, intrapersonal, and interpersonal levels as well as regarding different actors who are involved.
As of the 2019/20 school year, newly qualified teachers employed to teach in Austrian schools will be entering a mentoring programme at their career start for the first time. This programme is the responsibility of the school authority and is to last for the induction phase of 12 months. Support to newly employed teachers is provided by collegial mentors and accompanying induction courses provided by the Colleges of Teacher Training. Teaching the curriculum of general competencies as well as the didactic and methodological principles of teaching the diverse subjects of the national curriculum are the stated priority development goals. In order to achieve this, the lesson study approach was chosen as an instrument of professional development support, as it takes advantage of the long-standing and unique professional experiences of all teachers and the school principal in an individual school within its social community.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.