Disability and Equity in Education Commons^™

Breaking Barriers: Creating Inclusive Dance Spaces For High School Students With Cerebral Palsy, Samantha Michelle Barnewolt

Dance (MFA) Theses

Abstract This thesis explores the power of positive mindsets as it relates to creative movement development in dance for students living with Cerebral Palsy (CP) who also use motorized wheelchairs. This research dives into the development of movement mantras used to break negative mindsets and create thinking strategies that encourage movement development for varied bodies. As a result of collaborative efforts between the researcher, a student living with CP, and students living without CP, this study reveals that through the removal of mental barriers which complicate the accessibility of intentional movement in dance, students with CP may overcome obstacles that ...

The Inequitable Consequences Of School Disciplinary Policies On Black Girls In Ohio, Terry Husband, Shamaine Bertrand

Journal of Global Education and Research

Studies have examined the effects of school disciplinary policies and practices on Black boys. Much of this research highlights the degree to which many of these disciplinary policies and practices have affected Black boys in P-12 contexts in negative ways. A small and emerging body of scholarship has begun to investigate the effects of school discipline policies and practices in P-12 contexts on Black girls. The focus of this study was to investigate the effects of disciplinary policies on Black girls in comparison to girls from other races in the 15 largest school districts in Ohio. Drawing from recent out-of-school ...

An Artificial Intelligence Tool For Accessible Science Education, Jacob D. Watters, April Hill Dr., Melissa Weinrich Dr., Cary Supalo, Feng Jiang Dr.

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

One of the most important issues in accessible science education is creating a laboratory workspace accessible to blind students or students with visual impairments (VI). Although these students are often provided access to the science lectures, they are usually denied full participation in hands-on laboratory work. Current solutions to this problem focus on providing special accommodations such as asking sighted lab partners to complete the hands-on work. Although the accessibility of laboratory devices in modern science education has been improved in recent years, students with VI often remain passive learners. In this work, we developed a new artificial intelligence tool ...

Making Scientific And Technical Materials Pervasively Accessible, Jason J.G. White

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

In this paper, the question is explored of what policies, standards and practices are desirable to ensure that hardware, software and publications in the sciences and associated disciplines are created from the outset to be accessible to people with disabilities. Insight into this question can be obtained by considering the unique accessibility challenges that these materials pose, including complexities of notation, language, and graphical representation.

Having analyzed what sets this problem apart from broader issues of accessibility, the advantages and limitations of current international standards are reviewed, and contemporary developments in standards and policies are considered from a strategic perspective ...

The Perceptions Of Teachers Of Students With Visual Impairments On Students With Visual Impairments And Graphing: How To Teach, Ashley N. Nashleanas Ph.D.

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

Many gaps exist in what is known around teaching students with visual impairments (SVI) about how to use graphs (Rosenblum et al., 2018; Rosenblum & Herzberg, 2015; Zebehazy & Wilton, 2014a;2014b;2014c). When teachers first experience a student with a visual impairment, some of the questions that come to mind are: How can I be sure this student understands what I am saying about these graphs I show on the board? Will this student be able to keep up? The study herein, based on findings from Author (2018), serves as a guide for teachers to consider in the case that SVI enroll in their STEM ...

The Playground: An Online Summer Camp For Deaf And Hard Of Hearing Children, Emma Monson, Krista Schumacher, Annmarie Thomas

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

The PLAYground summer camp was developed by the Playful Learning Lab (PLL) at the University of St. Thomas, an undergraduate research group with a focus on learning through play. Through a partnership with a local school serving deaf and hard of hearing students, the PLAYground was designed to provide content to the deaf and hard of hearing community. Over the course of 8 weeks, 84 students were provided with materials that correspond with activities on the website. Each activity is accompanied with a lesson plan and video, both of which are available in English, American Sign Language, Spanish, and Arabic ...

Build Your Own Body Mod: Empowerment Through Prototyping And Design, Anaiss Arreola, Katherine R. Ganim

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

When you don’t have a hand, what could you have instead? This article introduces the impact of inviting youth with disabilities to learn tools and technology to design their own solutions and advocate for their own future. This approach to programming is rooted in a mindset of designing WITH, not FOR. Not only are design outcomes improved when users are incorporated into the process, but this approach has been shown to improve confidence in creating one’s own solutions. These programs include hands-on “design-your-own-body-mod” workshops, as well as a budding inclusive design consultancy led by youth with disabilities. Through ...

Empathy In Action: A Pathway To Acceptance Of Individuals With Disabilities In Sixth Grade Students, Stefanie Neal

Graduate Review

The need for middle school students to acquire social competence which improves peer acceptance creates the potential for a negative impact to healthy development, especially for individuals with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to determine if participating in a simulated experience of visual, auditory and/or hearing impairment would improve empathy and acceptance of individuals with a disability, in middle school students. Methods: Forty-four sixth grade students, aged eleven to twelve years, attending a school in the rural Midwest, participated in the study. Students were randomly divided into three groups and participated in three activities for ten minutes ...

Dissed: The Removal Of Black Educators From The American Schoolhouse, Sunni Ali

Journal of Research Initiatives

For almost a decade, the teaching profession has seen a drastic shortage of Black educators. The closing of many schools in urban areas has helped reduce the number of Black teachers in the profession. Also, evaluative protocols and rubrics that measure effective teaching practices harbor biased lenses that impact how Black educators maintain their employment status to succeed in the profession. Without promoting recruitment and retention interventions and culturally applied methods to assess teacher effectiveness, fewer students will have an opportunity to experience Black educators in their lifetime. The research paper used a critical race and culturally responsive theoretical framing ...

A Systematic Review Of Literature: Synthesizing Bullying And Extracurricular Activity Participation Correlations Among Students With And Without Disabilities, Kaycee L. Bills

Journal of Research Initiatives

Social issues about bully victimization are a topic receiving national attention in social work literature. Therefore, social workers must establish potential predictors of bullying victimization to eliminate them among at-risk populations, such as students who have disabilities. Adolescent and teenage students with disabilities are an oppressed population at risk of experiencing higher levels of bullying victimization. In addition, this population also experiences harsher socio-emotional outcomes because of bullying.

The purpose of this study was to synthesize past literature relating to the direct relationship between extracurricular involvement and bullying victimization. Research articles were retrieved across eight databases to assess past research ...

Rethinking Standardized Testing From An Access, Equity And Achievement Perspective: Has Anything Changed For African American Students?, Michael Couch Ii, Marquisha Frost, J. Santiago, Adriel Hilton

Journal of Research Initiatives

This study examined standardized testing and its effects on African American students. The authors focused on three perspectives: access, equity, and achievement about students' academic success in their K-12 educational experiences and how the quality of their education and test scores impacted their college acceptance rate, respectively. The three perspectives are specific to the works of Dr. Asa G. Hilliard and Dr. Barbara A. Sizemore, both of whom were passionate about the academic success and progression of students of African descent. Their many works embody a fight against standardized testing for students, especially those of color, and work toward a ...

Signing To Success: Developing Effective Asl Curricula In Secondary Public Education, Claire Sutterer

Undergraduate Research Symposium

This study aims to investigate the history of American Sign Language (ASL) in public schools, analyze where ASL education is today, and provide potential solutions to improving the quantity and quality of ASL classes within public high schools. A significant body of research focusing on preK-2nd grade students and research with primary concentration on students who are Deaf or hard of hearing has already been developed. However, developing effective methods for teaching ASL to hearing people is a relatively new and under researched area. ASL was not officially recognized as a language until the 1950s. It wasn’t until 2011 ...

A Velvet Rope Of Exclusion: The Delmar Divide, Madison Beirne

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Many reports have been published about the complex topic of segregation in the Greater St. Louis area. However, the effect of years of systemic segregation on education has not been adequately discussed in a modern context. This report studies the root causes of the Delmar Divide in an attempt to understand the impact it produced in the educational community. St. Louis is a classically divided city and the public-school system has suffered as a result of educational inequities. This work focuses on how the Delmar Divide created pockets that continue to marginalize residents, particularly students. The effect that purposeful segregation ...

Umaine Crime Alert, University Of Maine Police Department

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Examples of how safety alerts are communicated to members of the University of Maine community including email notification, individual campus portal pages for community members, and a notification posted across all pages of the university website. This safety alert describes the assault of an unnamed female by an unknown male who "briefly choked her, yelled a slur at her for wearing a pride shirt..." before running away.

The 5-Dimensional Model: A Tangible Framework For Differentiation, Anssi Roiha, Jerker Polso

Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation

Differentiation has become an indispensable teaching approach to meet the needs of diverse learners, and has thus garnered a lot of attention, particularly on a theoretical level. This has resulted in an abundance of differentiation models and frameworks. Despite the attention given to differentiation, most teachers still seem to struggle with implementing it in practice. The previous models have therefore failed to provide teachers with a clear and easy-to-use framework for differentiation. For this reason, we have created the 5-dimensional (5D) model of differentiation which aims to be a more accessible and tangible model than the existing ones. The model ...

Assessing Reading Comprehension And Memory Recall Of Children With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Jasmeen Mander

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This project examined the influence of background knowledge on reading comprehension and memory recall of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in comparison to typically developing children. Furthermore, the true or false scores and average story recalls of the two groups of children, ADHD and without ADHD were also compared. The participants varied in ages 9-14 years old and were assigned a self-paced reading task followed by 24 true or false questions and two memory recall questions. For both groups of children, the amount of background knowledge an individual conveyed did not correlate to their reading comprehension and memory recall ...

Evolving Inclusive Learning: From Retrofitting Disability To Designing For Variability, Monica Braat

The Organizational Improvement Plan at Western University

The problem of practice (PoP) addressed in this organizational improvement plan (OIP) is that curriculum is not currently interpreted, designed, and delivered to be inclusive of the range of learner variability present in Sursum Corda School Division (SCSD) classrooms. Although all students are physically included in SCSD classrooms, the learning of those who cannot assimilate to current instructional practices is generally supported through alternative, and often disconnected, practices and materials. Researched and experienced concerns with this approach include an increased potential to isolate, limit, or stigmatize targeted students and the inhibition of innovative instructional practices more generally. This OIP aims ...

The Swans/Ables Project: A Resource Developed By And For Teachers To Support The Teaching And Learning Of Students With Additional Learning Needs, Toshiko Kamei

2021-2030 ACER Research Conferences

The inclusion of students with additional learning needs in schooling is part of policy and practice in Australia. However, it has been well documented that teachers lack the resources and training to meaningfully include students with additional learning needs in the full range of learning in their classrooms. The SWANs program of work aimed to fill this gap through the development of assessments based on learning progressions that provide teachers with targeted information to support the teaching and learning of all students including students with additional learning needs. The development and implementation of the SWANs/ABLES suite of resources illustrates ...

Repositioning Disability In Children’S Picture Books Through Classroom Read-Alouds, Angela M.T. Prince, H. Emily Hayden

Education Publications

Students with disabilities represent an increasing percentage of students in general education classrooms. Yet, in early elementary grades, they may not see themselves represented in picture books. Teachers face many challenges in this issue, including choosing and evaluating books. In this article, we provide six questions to guide teachers' evaluations of picture books. We also recommend the use of these books in class read alouds that meet Common Core State Standards, and provide a guide for using these books to monitor a student's progress toward mastery of individualized education program (IEP) goals.

Managing Interpersonal Conflict: Adolescents With And Without Intellectual Disabilities, Olivia Faulconbridge

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Social Information Processing (SIP) informs the way we engage in social problem solving, such as conflict management. Although research has shown that adolescents with intellectual disability (ID) struggle more with the components of SIP when compared to typically developing peers, very little research has examined how adolescents with ID experience conflict with peers. This study examines the way adolescents with and without ID report experiencing and responding to conflict with best friends and non-friends utilizing their own rather than hypothetical scenarios. Nineteen adolescents (14 adolescents without ID and 5 with ID) were interviewed about their own real-life conflict experiences with ...