Confident, positive, but interested? Exploring the role of teachers’ interest in their practice of differentiated instruction

Given the substantial ongoing increase of individual learning demands, teachers are urged to address student heterogeneity in their daily teaching practice by means differentiated instruction (DI). As successful and effective implementation DI relies mainly on teachers, research has intensively focused examining teacher-related variables, such as teachers’ self-efficacy attitudes, that have played a crucial role use instructional practices. However, besides these well researched constructs, teacher interest is another important variable has, up now, received very little attention been rarely incorporated into inclusive education research. Against this background, study aimed bring together previous variables practice, extend prior literature incorporate interests. In total, 168 German in-service from different school tracks participated study. Results hierarchical linear regression (HLR) analyses showed significant positive predicting interests DI. Noteworthy contributed significantly even after controlling for attitudes. Implications results, further lines discussed.