Teacher Efficacy Beliefs Toward Serving Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students in Special Education: Implications of a Pilot Study

Educating a nation of culturally, ethnically/racially, and linguistically diverse (CLD) students is one of the many challenges facing teachers and teacher educators, resulting in teachers' questioning their ability to improve learning for these groups. Yet teacher efficacy is significantly related to student achievement, motivation, and students' own sense of efficacy (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001). Given continuous patterns of disproportionate representation of CLD students in special education, as well as inadequate services, it is important to understand the relation between teacher efficacy and success of CLD populations. The purpose of this pilot study not only examined the reliability of newly developed survey instrument but also investigated urban in-service special education teachers' perceptions about their abilities to teach CLD students. Thirty-one teachers participated in this study. Among these teachers, six agreed to join the follow-up debriefing. The results demonstrated adequate reliability, and several hypotheses were formulated during analyzing data and discussed with peer debriefers. Implications of this study will be provided.