International perspectives and trends in research on inclusive education: a systematic review Antonio M. Amor a , Mayumi Hagiwara b , Karrie A. Shogren b , James R. Thompson b , Miguel Ángel Verdugo a , Kathryn M. Burke b and Virginia Aguayo a a Institute on Community Integration (INICO), University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain; b Beach Center on Disability, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA ABSTRACT Inclusive education of students with disabilities in general education contexts has been a global movement for at least 30 years. We completed a systematic review of articles published in English- and Spanish-language peer-reviewed journals to obtain an international perspective on the status of inclusive education research and practice regarding students with disabilities, as reflected in the literature from 2002 through 2016. Our literature search, which involved two parallel searches to compare and contrast articles published in the English and Spanish professional literature, yielded 2380 articles which were categorised into seven categories: theory, descriptive, attitudinal, literature review, intervention, and non-inclusive. For both the English and Spanish literature, the most two common article types were theory and descriptive. The number of intervention articles, with findings on the efficacy of interventions to promote inclusive practices, was drastically lower in the Spanish literature. Implications for advancing future research and practice are discussed. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 3 August 2017 Accepted 21 February 2018 KEYWORDS Inclusion; students with disabilities; students with special educational needs; international perspectives; literature review Introduction Inclusive education has emerged as a key topic in both research and professional practice as well as a pressing issue in countries’ education policy agenda (Ainscow, Booth, and Dyson 2006; Echeita and Ainscow 2011; Muntaner, Rosselló, and de la Iglesia 2016). This concept has been theorised and researched across various disciplines, including psy- chology, pedagogy, and education and has been aligned with efforts to respect diversity in today’s schools (Sánchez-Teruel and Robles-Bello 2013). In policy development, there have been numerous steps taken to codify the right to inclusion for all students by enga- ging all stakeholders (UNESCO 1994, 2008). There are different conceptualizations of inclusion and approaches to promote inclus- ive education. Some consider it a matter of placement by substituting the former term ‘integration’ for inclusion. This approaches focus on traditional procedures to meet the needs of students with difficulties of any kind in general education classrooms (Nilholm and Göransson 2017). However, simply defining inclusive education by a © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Antonio Manuel Amor aamor@usal.es INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INCLUSIVE EDUCATION, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2018.1445304