Most of the works listed here are about teachers: their attitudes (de Boer, Pijl and Minnaert, 2011), their preparation (Forlin and Chambers, 2011) and their self-efficacy (Wray, Sharma and Subban, 2022). A smaller, more critical literature asks what inclusion means and whether it improves outcomes (Lindsay, 2007; Göransson and Nilholm, 2014). National context does a lot of work: Haug (2017) reports that definitions and implementations vary immensely between European countries, and Walton and Engelbrecht (2024) trace South Africa's pattern to path dependencies from colonial and apartheid times.
How the literature is organised
The oldest listed paper is a critique. Fuchs and Fuchs (1994) compared the inclusive schools movement with the earlier Regular Education Initiative and argued that the field's rhetoric had become increasingly strident and its perspective increasingly insular. Among the most-cited works on this topic, the International Journal of Inclusive Education carries more papers than any other journal: 45 of the 335 in the pool behind this page, ahead of the European Journal of Special Needs Education with 21.
The empirical literature is largely about teachers. De Boer, Pijl and Minnaert (2011) reviewed 26 studies of primary teachers' attitudes. Forlin and Chambers (2011) found that increasing pre-service teachers' knowledge of inclusion legislation and policy, and their confidence, did not address their concerns about having students with disabilities in their classes. Scruggs, Mastropieri and McDuffie (2007) synthesised 32 qualitative studies of co-teaching and found the dominant arrangement to be "one teach, one assist", with the special education teacher often in a subordinate role. A second strand treats inclusion as system change: Ainscow (2005) asks what the levers for change are, Ainscow and Sandill (2010) argue that leadership practice is crucial and examine the organisational cultures that support it, and Riehl (2000) reviews the principal's role in creating inclusive schools for diverse students.
Main debates
Two debates run through the listed work. The first is definitional. Göransson and Nilholm (2014) found four different understandings of inclusion in the literature and concluded that under a strict definition hardly any research reliably identified the factors that produce inclusive processes. Haug (2017) reports that no country has yet built a school system that lives up to the ideals.
The second is about effectiveness. Lindsay (2007) examined all 1,373 papers published in eight special education journals between 2001 and 2005 and found only 14 comparative outcome studies; the evidence, he concluded, does not provide a clear endorsement of the positive effects of inclusion, and where it exists the balance is only marginally positive. He also points out that inclusion is promoted on two different bases, children's rights and greater effectiveness, and argues the policy has been driven by the first. A literature review should make clear which kind of argument each source is making.
Where recent work is heading
Teacher self-efficacy is the construct in the most recent syntheses here: Wray, Sharma and Subban (2022) review what influences it, Yada et al. (2022) meta-analysed 41 studies and put its correlation with attitudes at r = 0.35, and Dignath et al. (2022) meta-analysed 102 papers covering 40,898 teachers in 40 countries, finding teachers' appraisals and efficacy in the middle of the scales and training associated with improvement on all three. Theoretical work continues: Rapp and Corral-Granados (2024) read inclusion through Luhmann's systems theory, and Love and Beneke (2021) apply disability critical race theory in early childhood. Technology is a newer theme, with a review of AI and new technologies for minority students (Salas-Pilco, Xiao and Oshima, 2022) and one on faculty competence in digital accessibility (Bong and Chen, 2024).
Most-cited foundational papers
Published before 2021 and ranked by how often later work cites them. Read the abstract of each and the full text of the three or four closest to your question. Citation count measures attention, not quality, so treat this as a map of what the field has argued about rather than a ranking of what is true.
Kerstin Göransson, Claes Nilholm (2014). European Journal of Special Needs Education.
Cited by 577doi:10.1080/08856257.2014.933545
Most-cited papers since 2021
Primary studies and conceptual papers from 2021 onwards. A paper published in 2024 has had a few years to accumulate citations where the works in the section above have had decades, so compare these counts with each other rather than with the ones above.
Nida Khaleel, Mohamed Alhosani, Ibrahim Duyar (2021). Frontiers in Education.
Cited by 93Open accessdoi:10.3389/feduc.2021.603241
Recent reviews and meta-analyses
The fastest way into a literature. A good review gives you the structure of the field, a reference list to mine and, in its limitations section, the gaps other researchers have already spotted.
Katharina-Theresa Lindner and 3 others (2023). European Journal of Special Needs Education.
Cited by 135Open accessdoi:10.1080/08856257.2023.2172894
How big the literature is, and where it is published
OpenAlex indexes 22,472 works whose title matches this topic. The chart shows how many were published each year from 2000 to 2025; the current year is left out because it is incomplete.
Show the numbers as a table
Year
Works
2000
72
2001
98
2002
112
2003
113
2004
124
2005
188
2006
216
2007
243
2008
227
2009
269
2010
362
2011
409
2012
506
2013
586
2014
664
2015
847
2016
779
2017
941
2018
1,024
2019
1,290
2020
1,395
2021
1,267
2022
1,249
2023
1,406
2024
1,828
2025
2,677
Journals behind the most-cited work
Counted across the 335 most-cited works on the topic, not across everything published. Browsing recent issues of the first two or three is a reliable way to find current work that has not yet been cited much.
International Journal of Inclusive Education45 papers
European Journal of Special Needs Education21 papers
Teaching and Teacher Education17 papers
Education Sciences16 papers
Sustainability9 papers
Frontiers in Education6 papers
Frontiers in Psychology6 papers
Journal of Research in Special Educational Needs6 papers
Search strings to copy
Written for databases that accept Boolean operators (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, PubMed, EBSCO). Quotation marks keep a phrase together, an asterisk stands in for the end of a word, and OR groups go in brackets. British and American spellings are written out with OR rather than covered by a single-character wildcard, because those wildcards differ between databases: PubMed’s help page documents the asterisk only, and asks for at least four characters before it. Limit the search to title and abstract first; widen it only if you get too little. Our guide to starting a literature review covers how to record what you searched.
Teacher attitudes and self-efficacy
("inclusive education" OR inclusion) AND (teacher* OR "pre-service") AND (attitude* OR "self-efficacy" OR belief* OR concern*) AND ("special educational needs" OR disabilit*)
Outcomes for students
("inclusive education" OR "inclusive classroom*" OR mainstreaming) AND (achievement OR "academic outcome*" OR "social participation") AND (disabilit* OR "special educational needs" OR "learning difficult*")
Country-specific policy and practice (replace the country)
("inclusive education") AND (Philippines OR Brazil OR Turkey OR India) AND (policy OR implementation OR barrier* OR challenge*)
Explore inclusive education in Wonders →Opens Wonders on this question. Once you are signed in it becomes a project with suggested sub-topics and keywords you can edit before searching. The trial is 14 days.
Sub-topics to narrow into
A thesis-sized question usually sits inside one of these, combined with a population or a setting.
Teacher attitudes
de Boer, Pijl and Minnaert (2011) reviewed primary teachers' attitudes; Lindner et al. (2023) updated the picture.
Riehl (2000) and Khaleel et al. (2021) on the principal's role; Ainscow (2005) on levers for change and Ainscow and Sandill (2010) on organisational cultures.
Does inclusion work?
Lindsay (2007) found only 14 comparative outcome studies in 1,373 papers from eight special education journals, and no clear endorsement of positive effects.
Technology and accessibility
Recent reviews cover AI for minority students and digital accessibility in higher education.
How to cite these papers
Every paper above has a DOI, a part of the reference that is easy to leave out. Here is one of them, “Regular primary schoolteachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education: a review of the literature” (2011), in the two styles students ask about most:
APA 7th edition
de Boer, A., Pijl, S. J., & Minnaert, A. (2011). Regular primary schoolteachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education: A review of the literature. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 15(3), 331–353. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603110903030089
MLA 9th edition
de Boer, Anke, et al. “Regular Primary Schoolteachers’ Attitudes towards Inclusive Education: A Review of the Literature.” International Journal of Inclusive Education, vol. 15, no. 3, 2011, pp. 331–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/13603110903030089.
Check the details against the article itself before you submit: databases, including the one behind this page, sometimes carry the online-first year rather than the volume year. Full rules and more examples are in our guides to APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver and ABNT, with the rest in the citation guides. You can also format a reference from its DOI with our free citation tools.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between inclusion, integration and mainstreaming?
Say which definition you are using, because researchers do not share one. Göransson and Nilholm (2014) found four understandings in the literature: inclusion as the placement of pupils with disabilities in mainstream classrooms, as meeting the social and academic needs of pupils with disabilities, as meeting the needs of all pupils, and as the creation of communities. Haug (2017) makes a similar narrow/broad distinction and reports that placement is the most frequent criterion in practice, with the quality of teaching and learning a lower priority.
Why is so much of the research about teacher attitudes?
Because positive attitudes are argued to play a considerable role in implementing inclusion successfully, as de Boer, Pijl and Minnaert (2011) put it at the top of their review. That review of 26 studies found most primary teachers held neutral or negative attitudes, related to training, experience and the pupil's type of disability, and could draw no conclusion about the effect of those attitudes on pupils' social participation. Lindner et al. (2023) repeated the exercise over 36 later studies and reached much the same result. Woodcock, Sharma and Subban (2022) is the kind of study that goes further: teachers with high and low self-efficacy understood inclusive education similarly, but taught differently.
Can I write about inclusive education in my own country?
Yes, and it is often the best approach. Haug (2017) reports that definitions and implementations of inclusive education vary immensely between countries, so findings do not transfer directly. Walton and Engelbrecht (2024) on South Africa and Mpu and Adu (2021) on South African schools are two country-focused models, and Khaleel, Alhosani and Duyar (2021) is one from the United Arab Emirates.
How this page was made
The lists come from OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works whose data are published under a CC0 licence, queried on September 21, 2026 for works whose title matches ("inclusive education" OR "inclusive schools" OR "inclusive classrooms" OR "inclusive classroom"). Only works with a DOI are listed. Each one was checked against the publisher’s own record at Crossref or DataCite (title, year, first author, journal, volume and pages), and in three cases, where the publisher deposited no byline, against PubMed; anything OpenAlex or Crossref flags as retracted was left out, and an editor took out results that matched the words but not the subject. Citation counts are OpenAlex’s on that date and are usually lower than Google Scholar’s, which counts more kinds of document. Ranking by citations tells you what a field has relied on, not what is correct; several heavily cited papers on any topic are cited because later work disputes them. Books without a DOI are missing, which matters in fields where the founding text is a book.
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