Abstract

Teachers' preparedness is a critical component in implementing inclusive education. It is pertinent to understand whether mainstream instructors are ready for inclusion as the number of children with special needs increases steadily over the years. The Zero Reject Policy has accelerated the implementation of inclusive education in Malaysia. While this is an essential step forward, assessing teachers' readiness for change is critical. This study aims to find out the predictive factors (attitudes and self-efficacy) on the preparedness of mainstream primary school teachers towards the implementation of inclusive education. This study is of a correlational research design where questionnaires were distributed to 367 teachers randomly selected from a cluster of nine schools in Hulu Selangor, Malaysia. The results show that teachers have moderate levels of readiness, attitudes and self-efficacy. There are also significantly positive relationships and predictive correlations between attitudes and readiness as well as self-efficacy and readiness. This implies that attitudes and self-efficacy should be considered in gauging teachers' readiness in the implementation of inclusive education. Taken together, findings in this study could inform further inclusive education research in Malaysia and could be taken into consideration in the design and execution of teacher training courses on Inclusive Education.

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