All students deserve access to effective, equitable physics education. Postsecondary faculty have been shown to be unprepared to support students with disabilities in their classes, and popular, research-based introductory physics curricula do not adequately plan for variations in learners’ needs, abilities, and interests. It is urgent to address this disparity because students with disabilities are enrolling in postsecondary education at increasing rates and enroll in STEM degree programs at steady rates. Specifically, in 2014, the National Center on Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) found that 10.5% of students enrolled in science and engineering degree programs identified with a disability. The purpose of this paper is to provide resources that instructors can use in their classes to promote accessibility and support all learners. In this paper we: 1) provide a brief review of the literature related to supporting students with disabilities in the context of STEM; 2) describe Universal Design for Learning, which is a design framework intended to encourage development of curricula that support all learners; and 3) provide a list of resources that physics instructors can use to increase support for students with disabilities.
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Specifically, we searched The Physics Teacher, American Journal of Physics, and Physical Review Physics Education Research journals for research articles, as these are journals where many physics instructors look for ideas about their teaching. We selected search terms that cover a range of colloquial and technical terms related to disability as well as common diagnoses: disability, disabled, accessibility, blind, deaf, ADHD, special needs, learning disabilities, physical disabilities, and mobility disabilities. In total we identified 22 articles about accessibility and/or disability and physics.
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We caution the reader that some of these articles promote an individualistic view of disability (i.e., where the deficit lies within the individual) rather than a social view of disability (i.e., where the issues lie within the learning environment that is creating barriers for the students). We urge instructors to adopt a social view of disability, which we find supports emphasis on the role of the instructor in identifying and removing instructional barriers.
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2021
American Association of Physics Teachers
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