New Online Accommodations Are Not Enough: The Mismatch between Student Needs and Supports Given for Students with Disabilities during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in nearly all universities transitioning their in-person courses to online instruction. Recent work from our research team conducted in Spring 2020 established that the immediate transition to online learning presented novel challenges for students with disabilities: students were unable to access previously established accommodations and there was a lack of information from Disability Resource Centers (DRCs) about adapting accommodations to online environments.

Costs and Benefits of Undergraduates Revealing Depression to Online Science Instructors

“…, 2020 ). Given the documented gap between students’ needs and the accommodations they are provided in online science courses ( Gin et al. , 2022 ), we argue that helping students feel comfortable enough to reveal depression in class may be a concrete step toward creating a more diverse and inclusive scientific community.…”

“…In the context of science courses, disability resource centers often communicate to instructors that a student may need a specific accommodation, but often do not reveal the specific disability/disabilities of a student. However, many students with depression are not registered with their campus’s disability resource center and lack access to formal accommodations ( Gin et al. , 2022 ).…”

“…As such, students may need to reveal their depression to self-advocate for accommodations they need within a course, especially if they are not registered with the disability resource center or existing accommodations are not suitable for evolving learning environments ( Gin et al. , 2020 , 2021a , 2022 ; Pfeifer et al. , 2021 ).…”

Aspects of online college science courses that alleviate and exacerbate undergraduate depression

“…In addition to the difficulty of developing relationships online, online proctored testing and at-home distractions that interfered with students’ courses were also selected by over half of students as aspects that exacerbated their depression. Proctored online testing has been found to exacerbate student anxiety [ 79 – 83 ] and to create challenges for students with disabilities [ 84 , 85 ]. The threat of being “flagged” as cheating when carrying out routine behaviors such as looking down or even needing to step away for health reasons has been described to take a profound toll on students’ mental health, which is echoed by students in this study.…”

REFLECTING BACK AND GOING FORWARD: Promising Pedagogical Practices for Culturally Relevant/Sustaining and Equitable Online Leadership Education

“…In addition to stable connections and bandwidth, students also struggle with accessibility with respect to course materials. In their work, Gin et al (2022) examined the degree to which students with disabilities were being properly accommodated in online classes, and they found that more than half of their student sample faced challenges with video-proctoring software, limited access to a distraction-free environment, and a lack of accommodation from instructors despite official documentation. Given all of the Journal of Leadership Education work shared above and what we know about the continued full-body-brain impacts of COVID-19 on online learning, identifying strategic, inclusive, and equitable pedagogy is critical for sustaining student engagement and for continuing to care for students as whole people (Cash et al, 2021;Goertzen & Squire, 2019).…”