A new study has shown significant improvements in student engagement when teachers adopt evidence-based strategies to support students with learning difficulties.
The research, led by two experts from QUT’s Centre for Inclusive Education, focused on high school students with language and attention disorders like ADHD and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), and aimed to see how evidence-based strategies improve accessibility of classroom teaching.
Teachers who took part in the Accessible Pedagogies program learned new techniques to make their lessons easier to understand. What they found was that students showed greater focus and comprehension in the classroom, suggesting that using these strategies helps all students, especially those with learning challenges, by removing unnecessary barriers to learning.
The QUT researchers, Professor Linda J. Graham and Haley Tancredi, along with Dr Callula Killingly and Professor Naomi Sweller from Macquarie University, are now looking at how these methods can benefit younger students and schools in disadvantaged areas.
Reading struggles reveal hidden challenges
Tancredi said the study offers some important insights for how schools can better equip their staff to identify and address the needs of students with learning difficulties like DLD and ADHD.
“Teachers often enter the profession because they are skilled communicators, have good self-regulation and memory strategies, and love learning,” Tancredi told The Educator.
“Together, these skills help teachers quickly and seamlessly interact with their students, and when needed, interpret and repair communication breakdowns,” she said. “Teachers can also be skilled at redirecting students’ attention and keeping them on task.”
Tancredi said these “naturalistic” classroom supports for language, attention, and memory are essential for students, but can mean difficulties with language, attention, and working memory are overlooked in real time.
“There are more obvious signs that teachers can look out for, such as reading and writing difficulties,” she said.
“These are harder to overlook and in the classroom, include signs like slow and laboured reading, a resistance to read, and written work that contains many errors that the student cannot repair even with teacher feedback.”
Tancredi said students with neurodevelopmental disorders are at higher risk of poor emotional, social, and psychological wellbeing, and females are particularly at risk.
“So, these difficulties can act like ‘red flags’ that can alert teachers to consider whether language and/or attentional difficulties sit behind them,” she said.
“This may mean checking ourselves for possible unconscious bias, where our brain makes shortcuts to explain away reasons for students’ issues with comprehension, inattention or apparent ‘forgetfulness’.”
Tancredi said schools can better equip their teaching teams by encouraging teachers to work together to discuss students who are not progressing in their learning and to understand why this might be.
“This might include moderating and unpacking student work samples or assessment and considering students’ literacy, learning, wellbeing, and other skills holistically,” she said.
Standardisation can ensure consistency of feedback
Professor Graham said data-driven approaches can help teachers assess the effectiveness of inclusive teaching strategies and improve overall student outcomes.
“Data driven approaches are essential for ensuring that observation and feedback/coaching processes are based on empirical evidence of effectiveness and not simply individual experience or opinion,” Professor Graham told The Educator.
“In the Accessible Assessment ARC Linkage project, we distilled evidence from the cognitive and communication science literature to identify a range of highly effective strategies which we used to create a standardised observational measure.”
Professor Graham said the concept of standardisation is often feared in education circles but what it means, in this case, is that there are explicit observable criteria on which trained observers can agree.
“This is critical for the validity of feedback and for achieving consistency and effectiveness of practice across a school,” she said.
“These criteria can be adapted, as we piloted in Haley’s research, so that they can be used by students who can act as observers, providing feedback in real time to teachers who can use those data to critically examine their own teaching.”
Professor Graham said the effectiveness of these strategies and impact on overall student outcomes can reliably be assessed using the types of research designs the team of researchers from QUT and Macquarie University have used and will be using in the future.
“These types of research include waitlist group comparison studies involving control groups who do not receive the intervention, and randomised control trials,” she said.
“In our planned future research, we will refine these measures with a larger range of students and teachers, in both primary and secondary schools, and in schools serving disadvantaged and/or regional and remote communities.”
The critical role of supportive leadership
Tancredi said school leaders – particularly those working in disadvantaged communities – play an important role in fostering a culture that supports the adoption of accessible teaching practices.
She says while teachers often report that they are supportive of inclusive education, “practical realities” such as a lack of professional support, limited planning time, and lack of access to specialist teacher collaborators can work against teachers’ confidence to consistently use accessible teaching practices.
“School leaders therefore have an important role to play in setting the conditions under which teachers can successfully develop professional knowledge and skills in using accessible teaching practice,” Tancredi said.
“For sustainable practice change, teachers require professional learning that is relevant to the school context, responsive to students and their learning requirements, collaborative, and practice focused.”
Tancredi said the role of school leaders must start with a vision for what inclusive education and accessible teaching practice will look like in their school, and a plan for how to achieve that vision.
“In alignment with the UN CRPD General Comment No. 4, where genuine inclusion is defined as ‘…a process of systemic reform embodying changes and modifications in content, teaching methods, approaches, structures and strategies in education to overcome barriers...’,” she said.
“School leaders can also support teachers to enact the vision through support to build communities of practice focused on accessible teaching, where teachers can mentor one another and refine their pedagogies.”
Tancredi said leaders can also support their teams by creating opportunities for teacher collaboration, time to share practice and embed student feedback, and to review progress towards sustaining accessible practices.
Future research to include remote school teachers
When asked how schools without access to formal training programs like Accessible Pedagogies can adopt similar strategies to support students with language and attention difficulties, Professor Graham said there are two potential solutions she and the team have explored.
“First, teachers in small regional and remote schools, which do not often get the opportunity to participate in large-scale research like this, have asked us how they can participate in this research as individuals,” she said.
“Their request presented a challenge, so we have built a phase into our future research that will open the professional learning to teachers in this group.”
Professor Graham said this challenge was ultimately serendipitous.
“They made us engage with a problem that we were already wondering about, due to our previous research with Central Queensland region, so we were grateful,” she said.
“Second, we are working feverishly on a new book, Accessible Assessment and Pedagogies: improving outcomes through inclusive practice, in which we are explaining in detail what we did and the impact for students, teachers, and our partner schools.”
Professor Graham said while this won’t replace the need for professional learning, it will be “a very good start” and will support the work in schools as it unfolds.