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Educational researchers have challenged Bandura’s prediction that self-efficacy beliefs tend to be established early in learning and that once set, self-efficacy beliefs persist unless a critical event causes them to be reevaluated. However, the results have been mixed in previous research, including being positive, negative, and unchanged. In response, we evaluated how 75 teachers (i.e., special educators) rate their teaching self-efficacy beliefs in motivating student reading and adapting reading instruction at two time points. All teachers taught students with an intellectual disability, communication difficulties, and poor reading skills. The teachers participated in a workshop to learn teaching reading strategies with apps under various conditions (comprehension strategies, phonemic strategies, or both comprehension and phonemic strategies). We analyzed teacher self-efficacy beliefs at two time points with a 12-week span (pre-and postintervention). First, we developed measures of teacher self-efficacy through confirmatory factor analyses. Next, we analyzed the data with multiple imputation and mixed linear regression with difference-in-differences (DiD). The results indicated no statistically significant treatment effect on teachers’ rating of their teaching self-efficacy beliefs. We conclude that our results agree with Bandura’s original prediction and thus, his social cognitive theory.

Background: It can be challenging for people with intellectual disabilities to convey their thoughts and opinions because of cognitive, speech and language impairments. Consequently, facilitating their ability to communicate using augmentative and alternative communication methods is essential. The picture-based framework Talking Mats has been applied in many studies and has been shown to be successful in facilitating communication and soliciting views from individuals with intellectual disabilities and communication difficulties. The aim of this study was to describe the views of students with intellectual disabilities and communication difficulties on speech and reading activities and to examine whether valence scores (from negative to positive) on these views were associated with performance on tests of their corresponding abilities. Methods: This is a cross-sectional quantitative survey study. A group of 111 students with intellectual disabilities and communication difficulties aged 7-21 were interviewed about their speech and reading activities using the visual framework Talking Mats. Their answers were scored on a three-grade like-dislike continuum and were correlated with their results on adapted tests of the corresponding abilities. Findings: The students expressed their views on speech and reading activities. The scored views on speech were positively associated with speech production, and the scored views on reading activities were positively related to reading ability. This suggests that their opinions as expressed through Talking Mats were consistent and reliable. Conclusions: Most students with intellectual disabilities and communicative difficulties can reliably express their own opinions of their abilities when they are provided with a clear visual structure and pictorial support, such as Talking Mats. In this study, this was seen for students with a mild intellectual disability from age seven and onwards and for students with a more severe intellectual disability from 12 years of age and onwards.