The dose-response effects of training duration on physical educators' attitudes toward inclusive practices

Abstract

Teacher preparedness determines whether Inclusive Physical Education (IPE) succeeds in practice, yet global policy commitments under the UNCRPD and Sustainable Development Goal 4 have outpaced the evidence needed to implement them, particularly regarding how much professional development (PD) is required to shift teachers’ attitudes. Problem Statement. PD reliably improves teacher knowledge but has a markedly smaller effect on the deep-seated beliefs that determine whether inclusion is genuine rather than nominal, and almost no rigorous work has quantified this dose-response relationship, particularly in Global South contexts such as Morocco, where fragmented, short-term training dominates and a persistent implementation gap separates inclusive-education policy from classroom reality. Approach. This experimental study addressed that gap by comparing three PD durations, no training, a one-year 16-hour workshop, and a three-year 256-hour multi-level program, to determine how much training is needed to produce meaningful, comprehensive attitudinal change. Material and Methods. Seventy-two Moroccan physical education teachers, stratified across the country’s 12 administrative regions, were assigned to a no-training control group (n = 24), a one-year 16-hour group (n = 24), and a three-year 256-hour group (n = 24). Attitudes toward teaching students with visual, physical, and intellectual disabilities were measured pre- and post-intervention with the Arabic adaptation of the Physical Educators’ Attitudes Toward Teaching Individuals with Disabilities-III (PEATID-III; α = 0.88), assessing perceived outcomes of inclusion, effects on student learning, and self-assessed need for further preparation, analysed with repeated-measures comparisons, one-way ANOVAs, and Bonferroni-corrected post-hoc tests. Results. A clear dose-response pattern emerged: the three-year cohort improved by 51.10% in attitudes toward inclusion for students with visual disabilities, versus 37.37% in the one-year group and 4.93% in the control group, with significant gains across all nine attitudinal measures and all three disability categories, while the one-year group improved on several but not all dimensions and the control group showed no significant change. Discussion. Short-term training initiated change, but only sustained, multi-year PD produced the comprehensive transformation genuine inclusive practice requires, a pattern consistent with a belief barrier that resists brief intervention and an experience paradox in which years of teaching experience alone did not predict more favourable attitudes. Conclusions. Training duration functions as a measurable, actionable lever for attitudinal change; these findings offer Morocco, and other Global South systems facing similar constraints, a quantitative, scalable framework for redesigning professional development around sustained, longitudinal engagement rather than isolated workshops.