From leadership research to district action: A Systematic Research Review on Teachers’ Self-Efficacy in Educating Autistic Students

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: review-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Abstract Background and Aim Ensuring equitable education for all students, including those with autism, is a core international commitment. The OECD (2018) defines equitable education as providing equal learning opportunities through responsive support tailored to individual needs. From this perspective, inclusive education involves both rights-based and needs-based approaches and emphasizes the importance of quality and adaptability in educational provision. Teachers’ self-efficacy—their perceived confidence and belief in their ability to teach and support autistic students—is a critical factor in achieving these aims. However, despite growing commitments to inclusion, challenges are frequently reported not only by teachers, but also by parents and autistic students, including feelings of exclusion, misunderstanding, and inadequate support within educational settings. This review aims to synthesize existing research on teachers’ self-efficacy in educating autistic students, identify influencing factors, assess methodological approaches, and outline future directions. Methods A mixed-methods systematic review was conducted using a convergent integrated design. Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods studies were synthesized. Searches were carried out in four databases: PsycInfo, ERIC, Education Source, and SCOPUS. Study quality was assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT; Hong et al., 2018), and the review followed PRISMA guidelines. Main Contribution Fifty-seven studies were included. Findings indicate that although many teachers are willing to support autistic students, their self-efficacy is often undermined by limited professional development, structural barriers, and insufficient support. Key facilitators include sustained, practice-oriented professional development and supportive leadership. However, the predominance of self-report methods limits understanding of how self-efficacy translates into classroom practice. Conclusions Teacher self-efficacy is shaped by both systemic conditions and individual perceptions of the ability to meet diverse student needs. Strengthening self-efficacy is essential to advancing equitable education for autistic students. Keywords: education, autistic students, systematic research review, teachers’ self-efficacy

Study methods

This systematic review was conducted as a mixed-methods systematic review, drawing on Stern et al. (2020), who propose that mixed-methods reviews offer a more comprehensive foundation to inform practice and policy by incorporating findings from quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research. While conducting mixed-methods reviews involves a certain degree of complexity, the primary aim is to integrate or combine quantitative and qualitative data to achieve both breadth and depth of understanding that may confirm or challenge existing evidence (Stern et al., 2020). Various approaches can be applied, and in this review, we adopted a convergent and integrated approach. This approach involves combining data extracted from quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods studies (Stern et al., 2020). A key step in this process is transforming the data into a compatible format (Voils et al., 2009). Following Frantzen and Fetters (2015), we chose to transform quantitative data into qualitative form, allowing conversion into themes, categories, or narratives. This review also followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines (Page et al., 2021). The quality of the studies was assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT), Version 18 (Hong et al., 2018). This review was not preregistered.

Limitations

This review has several limitations. First, the selected inclusion and exclusion criteria may have led to the omission of relevant studies, resulting in an unintentionally biased sample. Second, restricting the review to English-language publications and excluding grey literature may have excluded important findings. Third, the methodological heterogeneity of the included studies may have influenced the synthesis. However, this heterogeneity also allowed for the inclusion of valuable insights from diverse disciplines and research traditions. Fourth, although quality assessment was conducted, we followed Hong et al. (2018) in opting not to exclude studies solely based on lower quality. While this approach supported broader inclusion, it may have affected the overall validity of the review. Fifth, although the search strategy was carefully constructed around the self-efficacy construct, studies that used broader or alternative terminology (e.g., “self-confidence” or “perceived competence”) may not have been captured. These terms were intentionally excluded to maintain conceptual precision in line with Bandura's (1977, 1997) definition of self-efficacy. While this decision preserved conceptual clarity, it may also have limited the scope of the included literature.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Linda Petersson-Bloom; Erika Hansson. A Systematic Research Review on Teachers’ Self-Efficacy in Educating Autistic Students. Autism & Developmental Language Impairments (2025-01-01). https://doi.org/10.1177/23969415251392318

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.