Students w/ LDs at College: Challenges & Accessing Education - Essay Sample

Introduction

Concerning the issue of accessibility to education, students with learning disabilities are considered to be among the most vulnerable. Currently, post-secondary students with learning and developmental disabilities are faced with various life challenges, particularly in colleges, or university settings were progressing with studies is an option (GradesFixer, 2019). College students with learning disabilities are believed to experience conditions that alter the functioning in their reasoning in a way that affects cognitive processes associated with the learning process. These conditions can adversely affect basic writing and reading abilities. They can also deter advanced life skills such as attention, short or long term memory, abstract reasoning, time planning, and organization.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

The greatest joy educators can experience seeing students grow. Consequently, challenges in the education sector are well handled by adopting the application of action research. Students with learning disabilities can, and do, succeed. Therefore, the use of action research to find inevitable solutions to the challenges of learning disabilities among college students is a good move towards addressing the issue. A failure to solve the problem using the right approach is capable of affecting an individual's life beyond academic life and can influence how they relate with others in the workplace, with friends and family. (GradesFixer, 2019). The challenge is best studied using action research because the primary consumers of the researcher will determine the focus of the project. The research will be more effective since it is carried out by researchers (educators) in the field they put much of their effort—teaching and student development (Rios, 2010).

Attending to students with learning disabilities requires a collaboration of efforts between various community members. Some of the participants may have more power and influence over the process, which includes people like parents, teachers, and the school's administration, as well as other regular students. All stakeholders, including the community at large, are stakeholders in the research on the experience of college students with learning disabilities. Each one of the stakeholders is concerned with the success of the education sector.

The most critical stakeholders in this research are teachers, students, and parents. The teachers and parents identify the strengths of a student, and then the teacher decides what exceptional educational support if any, the student needs. The parents or guardians of the student, together with the relevant teachers are responsible for creating an individual education plan for each student with learning disabilities. In this research, teachers will be involved to outline the challenges, solutions, and recommendations they wish to see, parents, to provide an overall assessment and behavioural characters they see with their children. At the same time, both regular and the students with learning disabilities will be interviewed to extract information on their relationship between the two groups. The school administration, together with authority members in the ministry, would also be involved to provide their strategic plans concerning the topic.

Researching the experience of college students with learning disabilities would require the use of qualitative research methods to collect data. Document analysis from previous research on the topic, observational techniques, focus group discussions, and Interviews are the best data collection tools on action research on the topic. Interviews would be conducted on teachers, parents, and students to search for beliefs, opinions, views, or experiences on the subject. Focus group discussions would be done on general community groups to find out their thoughts on the subject. The observational method would be used to analyze the aspect by studying how people treat college students with learning disabilities. On the other hand, document analysis would be based on existing sources, like medical records or books, articles in newspapers, personal documents, and government reports (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007: 3).

In the study on the experience of college students with learning disabilities, the role of the researcher would be to try to assess the feelings and thoughts of the research participants. The researcher would be required to ask participants to talk about things that may be very personal to them. Some occasions reliving past experiences may be difficult, whereas other times, the experience being explored is fresh in the mind of the participant. However, the primary duty of the researcher is to safeguard the data collected and the participants involved. The researcher would be entitled to collect data and information, analyses it, and draw conclusions and recommendations from the study.

Carrying out action research involves encountering several practical and ethical problems. The intimacy and association that is established between a researcher and participants in a qualitative study like in action research can raise various ethical issues, and the researching personnel may face dilemmas such as evading misrepresentations, establishing open and honest relations, and respect for privacy. Whenever a researcher has to choose between different methodological strategies and dealing with contradicting subjects, ethically perplexing situations may arise. One of such challenges is unit nonresponse, where a specific population may opt not to be part of the participants in a survey even if the individual is invited. Another problem that might arise in the data collection phase of the action research is item nonresponse. In this challenge, due to privacy and other concerns, some participants within the population is unwilling to respond to specific questions relating to sensitive issues such as cultural norms, risky behaviours, and citizenship. Lastly, the challenge of instrumentation might arise in conducting the action research where even when the participants are willing to respond to survey questions, it would still be challenging to design questions that gather the anticipated information.

Reflexivity

The process of conducting qualitative research is more likely to change the researcher in several ways. The position and background of a researcher affect what the researcher chooses to study, the communication and framing of conclusions, the methodologies considered more suitable for the study, the findings considered most appropriate, and the investigation viewpoint (Malterud, 2001). Having in mind the effects of the researcher at different points in the research process is what is referred to as Reflexivity. It is the perspective of systematically attending to the context of knowledge construction, particularly to the effects of the person conducting the research, at all steps of the research process (Palaganas et al., 2017).

Reflexivity is both process-oriented and a theoretical model. Viewing Reflexivity in terms of a concept refers to seeing it as a certain level of awareness. The process involves self-awareness which entails that the researcher is vigorously in control of the entire research process. The introspection on subjective roles in the research process is what is meant to be Reflexivity as a process. Reflexivity is a constant progression of self-examination by the researching personnel on their ethics, understanding, and recognizing how their "social background, location and assumptions affect research practices" (Palaganas et al., 2017).

Reflexivity is one of the most important aspects of qualitative research. The process of determining how researchers were themselves transformed and how they shaped the research process and outcome is an empowering and iterative procedure. By the application of Reflexivity, the researcher recognizes the resulting change presented about themselves by the research process and acknowledges how the change is subjective to the research process. In various qualitative researches, the person carrying out the research is in more close interaction with the topic they are studying, so the chances for the research process having a more significant impact is higher (Warren & Karner, 2010). In such a scenario, Reflexivity is critical because of the existence of the several ways in which unfairness by the person conducting the research may impact the research process, from the construction of data collection techniques and methods to the data collection phases, analyzing it and the report writing stages. Qualitative research largely depends on the researcher because data methodologies are subjective.

Reflecting on the research about the experience of college students with learning disabilities, one of the reflexivity moments is where the researcher meets a parent to a college student who has severally been bullied at school. In such occasions, the researcher may opt not to ask sensitive and confidential questions. More likely, the researcher does nothing other than empathizing with the respondent participants, convincing them that the ongoing research will try to solve their challenges if adequately executed and utilized accordingly by policymakers and by those responsible for the policy implementation procedures.

Another moment which required analyzing the situation at hand and the use of Reflexivity is where a participant may ask a more technical question that requires a well thought out response. Such questions included when a participant asked: "How could that research help us improve our lives?" Since the question is asked by people who long for immediate and appropriate measures, this research question is emotionally weightier than questions brought forward by other participants. Handling such questions requires understanding the effect of giving particular responses to the data acquisition process since the researcher knows it the process of finding a remedy to the challenge could take a substantial amount of time to handle. Probably a couple of years before it materializes to make an impact on social reality.

Research Question

Identifying a research topic is the first step in carrying out a qualitative study. The researcher then composes research questions on the topic. Research cannot continue without a formulated research question. In a qualitative research process, the research topic is different from the research question. According to Sutton and Austin (2015), a proper research question comprises of some concept associated with either an applied context or a theory, is researchable, and is stated clearly.

Qualitative research is most effective when carrying out a focus group-style or one-to-one interview to understand how a target demographic thinks and feels, and why they make certain choices. Therefore, a properly formulated research question should be able to discover opportunities and problems and from participants, should be easy to understand and digest, should be open-ended in nature, and without the need for clarifications.

A good qualitative research question does not automatically lead to organized and proper research. However, a poorly structured question more likely creates challenges that affect all successive stages of research (Sutton & Austin, 2015). Consequently, the quality of a research question affects the approval of the study by a dissertation committee, whether the research is funded, or published. A distinguishing factor of a qualitative research question is that it articulates the topic a researcher wants to explore, the perspectives and intentions of those comprising the social interaction being studied.

The following is an example of a poorly formulated...