Understanding special educational needs

DO all students have similar cognitive styles and abilities to perceive and organise information? Social and educational research says "no." Learning styles and preferences vary greatly among students. It is then obvious that some students face difficulty achieving success at school. Among them are those whom we categorise as students with special educational needs. They have learning difficulties or disabilities which make it harder for them to learn or access education than most other students of the same age. A student with special needs may need extra or different help at school and home because of physical difficulties, problems with thinking and understanding, emotional and behavioural issues, or a combination of these. Due to a lack of awareness and sincerity, we fail to attend to their needs. However, we should properly accommodate students with special needs in regular classrooms and give them an equal learning opportunity both at school and home.
A failure to accommodate students with special needs is a cause of high dropout rates at primary and secondary levels. It also makes education less meaningful for them because education is fundamentally a social and interpersonal process. In this social process, teachers, parents, other adults, and peers play crucial roles in a child's learning and development. Thus, the child is not alone in her/his world discovering various cognitive operations. When we single out the students with special needs by treating them differently, they become socially isolated. This isolation hinders an individual's development of ideas related to their self-concept. These isolated children also develop a negative outlook on life while constructing thoughts about who they are and considering other aspects of human identity as a social being.
What we need for Bangladesh is a tripartite but combined effort. First, the government needs to provide the schools with teacher training opportunities and specialised materials for instruction and testing. Second, teachers have to make sure that students with special needs are educated, to the maximum extent possible, with other students in the least restrictive environment. Finally, parents should be aware of their children's special needs. They need to realise that having a special educational need or learning a lesson in a different way does not make their children "bad students."
Parents know their children best. They know their likes and dislikes, their strengths and weaknesses, their abilities and challenges. Therefore, staying involved in their children's lives is very critical. Since all parents are not aware of their children's special needs, community and school-based information sharing sessions and parent-teacher meetings can be effective events for creating awareness among parents. In addition to taking care of their children's special needs at home, they can provide essential information to teachers and help develop an effective educational plan for their children.
Like parents, teachers also have very important roles to play. We summarise their roles in three steps: identification, instruction, and assessment. An initial observation of students by the classroom teacher is the first step of identification. If some students are identified, then the teacher needs to modify her instruction for those students and see if the modification makes any difference. If necessary, the teacher can also use diagnostic assessments to identify specific difficulties. Each of the disabling conditions has to be confirmed by applying specific criteria, and teachers need special training and materials for this purpose.
Some of the common learning deficits with which students are most likely to be placed in regular classes are mild mental retardation, sensory impairment, physical impairment, learning disability, emotional disturbance, attention deficits, and hyperactivity.
Scores on a standardised IQ test and students' adaptive behaviours can measure mild mental retardation. By adaptive behaviours, we mean the behaviours needed for normal functioning in daily living situations, such as expressive and receptive communication, personal hygiene, coping skills and so forth. Students with sensory impairment have vision, hearing, or speech deficits. Physical impairment refers to orthopaedic impairment, such as cerebral palsy or a physical illness, e.g., epilepsy or muscular dystrophy.
Students with a learning disability have average or above average intelligence. However, they function below age or grade level because of physiological, psychological, or cognitive processes involved in understanding and using language or mathematical reasoning. When such characteristics, as poor interpersonal relationships, melancholy, fears associated with school, or other inappropriate behaviours, interfere with learning, we call it emotional disturbance. Students with attention deficit disorder (ADD) are unable to sustain attention and stay focused. They are easily distracted. A student with hyperactivity fidgets excessively, has difficulty sitting, appears restless, and is always on the go.
Once the students with special needs are identified, teachers should instruct them accordingly. They may need to prepare individualised instructional materials. For this purpose, a teacher has to accurately identify her students' weaknesses and strengths. Then, she should set up short and long-term learning objectives and criteria for evaluations. The learning objectives have to be aligned with the individualised goals and students' preferred learning needs and styles. In addition, the teacher needs to make sure that these students participate in regular classroom activities to the fullest extent possible. It is also expected that the teacher will spend time with the students and simplify lessons both before and after the regular classes.
If we do not pay attention to the problems encountered by students with special needs, our assessments and evaluations cannot be reliable and valid. For example, a student who has auditory difficulty may not understand oral directions and can be easily distracted by noise. If a student has visual difficulty, she may not understand written directions and decode symbols and letters. Students with problems of time constraint and anxiety may not be able to complete assessments and provide correct answers. The behaviours of students with special needs may vary greatly. Therefore, factors such as embarrassment and variability of student behaviour may cause incomplete assessments and an inability to demonstrate the best work.
Since the aforementioned difficulties interfere with the validity and reliability of assessments, teachers should properly accommodate students with special needs. We categorise the accommodations into three broad types of adaptations: test construction, test administration, and testing site. The general format of the test should be simple and information should be presented in small segment to be processed at one time. All directions in a test should be simple and short. The invigilating teacher should read the written directions aloud and slowly and give students enough time to understand the directions and ask questions. If necessary, teachers may provide separate directions in larger fonts to students with visual impairment. During the test, the teachers ought to routinely check students' understanding of directions.
Adaptations during test administration involve change in procedures which may decrease any negative effects of students' disability on their performance. Most of the procedural changes in this type of adaptation are dependent on the types of learning difficulties of students. For example, if a student has a feeling of excessive anxiety, the teacher should avoid adding pressure by admonishing her/him to "Hurry and get finished" or by saying "This test will determine your future." In addition to adaptations in test administration, it can be sometimes necessary to make adaptations in testing site. An example can be allowing students with special needs to take the test in a different location. This can be a school resource room which is quiet and comfortable with fewer distractions.
We believe that there are many students in our schools whose academic careers are terminated by our lack of understanding and compassion. Teachers' and parents' rude comments and insults on their inability to accomplish traditional classroom success can easily turn them off. Instead of labelling them "bad students," we need to identify their learning difficulties and if they qualify for special educational needs. By attending to their special needs, we can make education meaningful for them and decrease high dropout rates at primary and secondary levels. Therefore, it is important that our government, teachers, school administrators, and parents think seriously about the students with special educational needs. We have to act right now because it's better late than never.
Shirin Aktar is a graduate student of Sociology at Khulna University and S.M.Anwaruddin is a lecturer of English (on study leave) at BRAC University Centre for Languages.