Date

5-23-2025

Department

School of Education

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Education (PhD)

Chair

Holly Eimer

Keywords

students with disabilities, self-efficacy, grade level expectations, elementary educators, hermeneutic

Disciplines

Education | Special Education and Teaching

Abstract

This hermeneutic phenomenological study describes elementary educators' experiences and self-efficacy in implementing grade-level expectations for students with disabilities significantly below grade level in Georgia public schools' inclusive classroom environment. Albert Bandura's self-efficacy theory guides this study which is grounded in the social cognitive theory. According to the self-efficacy theory, people are the masters of their own objectives, choices, and fate. The participants included 10 elementary public school general education or content area teachers who are one half of a co-teaching partnership. Individual interviews, focus groups, and blogs were used to collect data in order to investigate the nature of general education teachers' self-efficacy and lived experiences in an inclusive classroom. All data collection modalities are transcribed with a qualitative computer software program that aids the researcher in identifying codes and themes to understand elementary educators' lived experiences and self-efficacies in the inclusion classroom environment. To illustrate the importance of general education teachers lived experiences in inclusion classrooms, open codes were created using an inductive coding approach (Saldaña, 2021). The results of this hermeneutic phenomenological study include multiple themes: preparedness for inclusion teaching, co-teaching experiences, school experiences, and inclusion of classroom cultures.

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