NIU communication study on classroom accommodations receives inclusion award

Students with disabilities face a dilemma when discussing classroom accommodations with faculty.

Do they ask risk revealing more than they are comfortable sharing? Or do they safeguard their privacy - but potentially go without having their accommodations being implemented?

The voices of learners with disabilities lend lived experience to new, award-winning research from Northern Illinois University.

Communication professors Kathleen Valde, Ph.D., and Mary Lynn Henningsen, Ph.D., presented their findings at the Central States Communication Association's annual conference April 1-6 in Cincinnati, Ohio. "Managing Disability Privacy in Student-Faculty Classroom Accommodation Conversation: Sources of Turbulence and Strategies for Communicating Personal Boundary" was recognized with the CSCA's Inclusive Scholarship Award for significant contribution to the field.

The qualitative study employed interviews with nearly three dozen college students, from the undergraduate level to graduate programs, who had sought accommodations for disabilities.

Valde served as principal investigator on the conference paper, which illuminates the ways that student-faculty conversations about accommodations can negatively affect relationships, identities, student persistence and future interactions about accommodations.

What proactive steps can instructors take to mitigate student concerns over accommodations? Valde and Henningsen say asking "how" instead of "why" is a good starting place, to shift focus from potentially intrusive lines of questioning that could be perceived by students as unethical. While students' doctors and the campus disability resource centers are responsible for determining reasonable requests for accommodations, faculty focus should be more on facilitating.

"One of the most challenging things for students that we found in the data are 'why' questions: 'Why do you need this accommodation?' It's hard to answer a 'why' without feeling like you have to provide that disability information," Valde said. "Then, another thing we found that challenges personal boundaries is when they have to remind faculty about accommodations."

This spring's conference paper is a continuation of a study in 2019, Henningsen et al.'s "Student Disclosures about Academic Information: Student Privacy Rules and Boundaries." Valde and Henningsen also were inspired by the pain points of navigating accommodation requests in their own classrooms. They wanted to understand how to mitigate communication "turbulence" that arises when students feel caught between disclosing or concealing their disabilities.

"In past research, we had investigated Communication Privacy Management Theory, and the way in which students made choices about disclosing information to their faculty," Henningsen said. "And in the course of that private information-sharing research, what we found was that information about disabilities was one of the questions that people raised when they were trying to make sense of what they should conceal and reveal. But we didn't have the nature of data in that study that would allow us to go any further in that train of thought."

In their most recent research, Valde and Henningsen found students use a variety of subtle strategies - focusing on their accommodation needs rather than details about their disability, communicating boundaries and sometimes sharing selectively about their qualifying conditions.

"If you look at the implications, these challenges to students' boundaries affect their relationships and how they are perceived by faculty," Valde said. "It affects the students' self-esteem, and it also affects their willingness to seek accommodations in the future."

"And their learning," Henningsen added, sharing an anecdote about a student who logged in to an online test and found their accommodation for extra time had not been factored in. "That level of distraction took away from the assessment the student was trying to complete. This will clearly have downstream consequences on learning, and potentially grades, too."

Around one in five students attending college has at least one accommodation in place, and yet, even as early intervention and diagnostic practice have improved in recent years, more than a third of students with eligible disabilities still choose not to seek classroom accommodations.

"Even the statement that we use in our syllabi says you need to provide information about the accommodation, not your disability," Henningsen said. "We're creating an expectation in the formal way that we speak about it in our policies - that you might be immediately then turning around and violating as a faculty person because you're bringing it up in conversation."

The researchers also recommend that professors track the efficacy of various classroom accommodations. By offering options that have been implemented and worked well to meet the learning needs of previous requesters, faculty reduce the burden on students to educate their instructors. These power imbalances in classroom interactions make a critical difference.

"For students, every time they have this conversation, it's like a new experience because they don't know the level of background that a faculty member has with accommodations," Valde said. "It's an important issue, and one of the things that happen if these conversations don't go well is some students decide: 'I'm going to see if I can go without my accommodations.' "

Media Contact: Jeniece Smith

About NIU

Northern Illinois University is a student-centered, nationally recognized public research university, with expertise that benefits its region and spans the globe in a wide variety of fields, including the sciences, humanities, arts, business, engineering, education, health and law. The Wall Street Journal and CollegeNET recognize NIU as a leading institution for social mobility, or helping its students climb the socioeconomic ladder. Through its main campus in DeKalb, Illinois, and education centers for students and working professionals in Chicago, Naperville and Rockford, NIU offers more than 100 areas of study while serving a diverse and international student body.