This section highlights the demographic categories that attitudinal studies have found to be influential in attitudes toward students with disabilities. The themes that follow, which include gender, training, and years of teaching experience, were found within several studies assessing educators’ attitudes toward learners with disabilities.
Gender
Studies comparing gender differences in attitudes toward students with disabilities have presented mixed results. Yuker (1994) stated that although past studies have reported positive attitudes for females, the differences between the genders are diminishing. Findings from studies carried out in the 1990s recapitulated in a review of the literature establish that in about 67% of undertaken researches, female educators had a higher positive attitude concerning disabilities than their male counterparts (Avramidis & Norwich, 2002). Subsequently, some present studies are still consistently reporting disparities between genders, mostly with females articulating more favorable attitudes than males (De Boer & Pijl, 2011; Vas et al., 2015).
Findings from previous studies contribute to the proof that gender seems to be an indicator of attitudes for educators toward disabilities with male teachers showing a more negative stance when compared to female ones (Avramidis & Norwich, 2002; De Boer & Pijl, 2011; Vas et al., 2015). Despite the rationale behind the gendered disparity remaining open to speculation, studies have attributed it to a higher forbearance and more dynamic teaching mindset in females than males. This indicates that there might be no distinction between female and male educators when it comes to the provision of inclusive education (Woodcock, 2013).
Training
In existing studies, training seems to be a major aspect that sways educators’ capacity to modify their teaching approaches (Shulman, 2013). Training can be about content knowledge (for example, knowledge about ABS), pedagogical knowledge (for instance, including teaching ABS policies), and pedagogic content knowledge (such as how to teach specific content to a particular learner in an outlined context (Matherson & Windle, 2017). In teaching, the training of learners with disabilities was linked to a positive attitude toward such students. Vas et al. (2015) highlighted the significance of concentrating on the training of educators. In particular, vehemence needs to be set on promoting pedagogic content knowledge associated with learners with disabilities when seeking to sway educators’ attitudes positively toward such students.
Years of Experience
Researches comparing the impact of variations on attitudes toward teaching learners with disabilities have established that educators with a few years of experience have a more positive disposition than their more practiced colleagues (Alnahdi, 2012; De Boer & Pijl, 2011; Vas et al., 2015). Alnahdi (2012) found that there was very little difference in teachers’ attitudes toward teaching students with ID based on their years of experience, which ranged from 0 to 30. Educators who have less than five years of practice show a statistically significant higher positive attitude when compared to the ones who have been teaching for five or more years. This could be attributed to the fact that educators who have been teaching for less than five years graduated lately from special education schools, which results in their strong association with theoretical notions that are often in educator preparation programs in institutions of higher education. On the contrary, teachers who have been teaching for five years and above tend to be more reasonable and less naive in their opinions attributable to the actual teaching practice (Alnahdi, 2012).