Special education teachers’ understanding and use of evidence‐informed practice in the inclusion of children with SEN in Kuwait: lessons for teacher education

Abstract

This paper presents a study which has evaluated the extent to which a sample of elementary special education teachers in Kuwait understand and make use of evidence-informed approaches in the mainstream classroom with children with special educational needs. A questionnaire survey was developed and administered (N = 150), focussing on teacher understanding of and use of two selected evidence-informed approaches: peer tutoring strategy and the JIGSAW strategy. Results revealed a good degree of understand and use of both strategies. Recommendations are made in relation to further research on the evidenceinformed practice for the effective inclusion of children with special educational needs in Kuwait and internationally.

The scope for using international indicators of inclusive education in Kuwait and GCC countries: A preliminary study involving special education teachers

“…It was more interesting that older and more experienced teachers were more confident in relation to educational practices for IE, and more experienced teachers had higher levels of awareness of IE. This was perhaps somewhat counterintuitive, in particular given the changes in teacher preparation programmes in Kuwait since 2010 (Al-Shammari & Mintz, 2021). Kuwait University, the main provider of pre-service teacher education in the country, overhauled its curriculum content for teacher education in 2014 (Kuwait University, 2014), and we might have expected more recently qualified teachers to have higher levels of confidence on these two measures.…”

“…In Kuwait, there are both mainstream and special education schools (Oxford Business Group, 2020) and there is a specific special education teacher preparation track. Special education teachers support general teachers in the classroom with specialist input, as well as working in units for children that are attached to mainstream schools (Al‐Shammari & Mintz, 2021). Specifically, public mainstream schools are divided into two types of school that provide special education programmes for children with special educational needs.…”

“…There has also been a focus on school‐based continuous professional development (NCED, 2018), involving action research via the creation of professional learning communities (Al‐Shammari & Hornby, 2019). Other reforms in 2010 included the overhauling of teacher education programmes, with a renewed focus on curriculum content concerning the effective inclusion of children with SEN (Al‐Shammari & Mintz, 2021).…”