Abstract
The present study examines the poor fit between the idea of school meritocracy and the successful inclusion of students with special educational needs (SEN). Because students with SEN are assigned negative stereotypes related to suffering, failure, and difficulty regarding their school achievement, we argue that, if they succeed at levels comparable to those of regular students, they may experience backlash, a sanction for challenging the status quo. The results of two studies show that backlash can manifest itself in the form of lower assigned competence to students with special educational needs who succeed. More precisely, across a pilot and a main study, our findings indicate that while performing as well as students without special educational needs, the perceived competence of students with special educational needs was evaluated as lower by participants (pre- and in-service teachers), particularly when these students benefitted from an accommodation perceived as “unfair”. Due to its potential role in justifying inequities within educational contexts, the backlash effect is discussed as an ideological barrier to the inclusion of students with special educational needs.
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Notes
Although there is no clear definition of what special educational needs refer to (see Wilson, 2002 for a critic), the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) states that a child is considered as having special educational needs (SEN) if they have learning difficulties which require special educational provision, i.e., that is provision more than the average child, to be made for them.
Dyspraxia, also known as developmental coordination disorder, is a neurological condition that affects a person’s ability to plan and coordinate physical movements. It is a developmental disorder that typically manifests in childhood and can affect people throughout their lives (Polatajko & Cantin, 2005).
See Figure S1 in Supplementary Material for more details.
It could be noted that the difference was the same between the copies of the student without special educational needs (M = 15.59, SD = 1.78) and those of students with special educational needs (M = 15.89, SD = 1.53), t(92) = 1.70, p = .093.
See figure S2 in Supplementary Material.
The final sample size was lower than what was expected from the pre-registration. Implications are considered in the General Discussion section.
Descriptive statistics are presented in Table S7 and S8 in Supplementary Material.
It should be noted that as in the preliminary and the pilot study, the differences between the use of computer assistance (M = 4.54, SE = 0.05) and half-exercise (M = 3.98, SE = 0.10) were statistically significant, t(129) = 5.90, p < .001. The details of the scores are presented in figure S3 in Supplementary Material.
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This research was financially supported by AAPG2020 (Appel à Projet Générique 2020, Agence Nationale de Recherche) and is part of the ANR (Agence Nationale de Recherche) funding: “Can students with DIsability VIolate the Success Expectations?”.
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Stanczak, A., Aelenei, C., Pironom, J. et al. Can students with special educational needs overcome the “success” expectations?. Soc Psychol Educ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-023-09806-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-023-09806-x