Teachers are key actors who shape the learning environment and whose main tasks include motivating students to learn. Teachers can differ in the way in which they try to motivate students to learn and their motivational strategies can vary from autonomy-supportive to controlling. The present study explored how teachers’ personal beliefs and contextual factors relate to their self-reported autonomy-supportive or controlling motivational strategies. Nine grade six teachers at schools with varying student populations were interviewed. Based on their self-reported motivational strategies, two clusters of teachers were distinguished: teachers who mainly reported autonomy-supportive strategies and teachers who mainly reported controlling motivational strategies. The strategies of autonomy-supportive teachers aligned well with their personal beliefs and preferences, whereas some teachers in the controlling cluster would prefer more autonomy-supportive strategies. Underlying reasons for more controlling teaching strategies were mainly contextual, including ‘factors from above’ such as national standards or high-stakes testing, but mainly ‘factors from below’ referring to negative perceptions of students’ abilities, behaviour, background characteristics or motivation. Implications are drawn and suggestions for further research are provided.

Background: In the debate on inclusive education, students without special educational needs (SEN) are an important topic. However, there is a lot unknown about differences between these typical students in inclusive and non-inclusive classes. For example, the neutral results that are often found in earlier research could be caused by positive effects for some students, and negative effects for others. Purpose: This study investigated whether there is a relation between inclusive education and the academic achievement and socio-emotional functioning of typical students, and, more importantly, whether inclusive education affects the achievement and socio-emotional functioning of more and less intelligent typical students differently. Furthermore, we investigated whether differences occur by type of SEN of the included students. Here, we made a distinction between students with behavioural, cognitive and other problems. Sample: A representative sample of 27,745 students without SEN in Dutch primary education from a large cohort study in the Netherlands was used. Design and methods: Language and arithmetic tests were used to assess academic achievement. For socio-emotional functioning, both teacher and student questionnaires were used. A non-verbal IQ test was used to assess student intelligence. Based on the number of students with diagnosed SEN, the students without SEN were divided into several groups: typical students with no, a few and more than a few students with (certain types of) SEN in their class. Multi-level regression analyses were used to compare these groups. Results: For academic achievement, no differences were found between students without SEN in inclusive and non-inclusive classes. In this, we found no differences between intelligent and less intelligent typical students. For socio-emotional functioning, some differences were found, but the practical importance of these differences is unclear, since the effect sizes were small. The functioning of typical students does not meaningfully differ by type of SEN of the included students. Conclusions: The findings of this study are interesting in the light of the ongoing inclusion debate. Arguments against inclusive education often concern an assumed adverse effect on typical students. As in this study, hardly any differences were found between typical students in inclusive and non-inclusive primary school classes, this research strengthens the scientific evidence in support of inclusive education.