Investigating the Support-Oriented schoolwork changes and learning experiences of students with disabilities in terms of wellbeing and academic engagement during the COVID-19 disruption period

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, school closures worldwide highlighted the existence of certain educational gaps. The sudden and unplanned shift to online learning accentuated challenges including social, emotional, and technical barriers that exacerbated the difficulties experienced by students with disabilities such as limitations on social interaction and technology access. Based on this, the current study aimed to provide a snapshot of the difficulties experienced by students with disabilities during the pandemic from a global perspective, and to explore the impact of different types of support—physical, socioemotional, self-care, and educational—on the academic performance and motivation of students with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Responses to Educational Disruption Survey (REDS), conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), provided survey data captured from between December 2020 and July 2021 in order to examine the effects of the COVID-19 disruption on students, teachers, and school principals. In total, the study sample was comprised of 3,195 eighth-grade students from 692 schools across five countries who self-reported as having a disability. To address the study’s research questions, certain variables were derived through cluster analysis and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) utilising the items in REDS. R software was employed in this analysis and visualisation, while IBM’s SPSS (version 27.0) was utilised for the verification of assumptions and for conducting hierarchical regression analysis. According to the results, a significant relationship was found to exist between students’ receiving support and experiencing improved progress in certain subjects compared to before COVID-19, as well as increased motivation to complete schoolwork, capacity to plan for schoolwork completion, ability to keep up with schoolwork, and confidence in completing schoolwork. Overall, the most predictive variable affecting the learning experience of students with a disability during the COVID-19 disruption period was derived from their feelings related to the variables of wellbeing and satisfaction, followed by learning progress as an academic engagement variable, and subsequently by schoolwork and feedback.