Will Brehm  0:56
Jusso Nieminen, welcome to FreshEd.

Jusso Nieminen  0:58
Thank you very much.

Will Brehm  0:59
When we think about higher education today, how is the traditional student typically portrayed?

Jusso Nieminen  1:06
So, I must emphasize that, in my work, I have only really approached this question from the viewpoint of disabilities. What I think is interesting is that -so obviously, the answer to the question will arise in different contexts within different countries, higher education institutes. There are some general characteristics. For example, there was a very nice article by Wong Billy from 2021 where they outline these dimensions of the ideal student from the viewpoint of students and teachers in higher education who were thinking about. And they had, perhaps some non-surprising, at least for me, dimensions such as diligence and engagement, organization. discipline nature of students, reflexive, innovative, able to control their own studies and their own learning, proactive things like this. Even though we have some of these general ideas, of course, some countries, in legislation, they would have a very different answer to your question. For example, in Australia, they would definitely list Indigenous people as one equity group. And there will be a list of different types of people who count as equity groups in a very different way, as you would have here in Hong Kong, or in Finland, where I was born and raised. But what I do find interesting from my own specific point of view is that, even though we obviously have these contextual differences, in terms of what counts as an ideal student in different disciplines, different institutions, different countries, quite rarely do we understand how disabled students fit the idea of the ideal students. I think we tend to think that as higher education institution is widening, we are accepting more and more students – it’s not an elitist institution anymore in a similar way as it was 100 years ago – we now widen the access to higher education. We tend to think that now these equity groups are able to benefit from the good that higher education provides. And I think it’s interesting that it is spoiling the idea of an ideal student, or whether it is widening the image of the imaginative, ideal student. From the viewpoint of abilities, disabilities, I think that’s a very interesting question. And I think the next 10 years will really define whether disabilities also fit that widened idea of this portrayal.

Will Brehm  3:22
It’s quite interesting to think that, you know, like, on the one hand, there’s this massive democratization of access to higher education, but the portrayal of what we think of as an ideal university student sort of lags behind these groups that have now gained access. And as you said, there’s all different types of groups that are now gaining access to higher education. Do we know sort of, I don’t know, globally or within specific countries, how many students with disabilities are actually accessing university? And is that number increasing? Do we know that there is a greater number of students with disabilities gaining access to universities worldwide?

Jusso Nieminen  3:59
Yeah. This is a tricky question. I was struggling to answer it because, yes, I could give you some citations on how it is a global phenomenon, that through the massification of higher education, yes, the number of students with disabilities is also increasing in many contexts. And I could offer you some numbers from some specific contexts. I also really want to enhance the critical reflection that we have towards this and understand what they tell us. Because I’m aware of this thinking that we would have this our minority with a certain percentage like 4.6% in a certain context, and that we need to take care of, and we need to nurture because that’s what we need to do as the majority. That kind of thinking is often seen when we talk about policy and practice in higher education, in terms of disabilities. But what the number really tell us about, usually a rather low number is that also, in many concepts, Finland included, not very capable of promoting the access of people with disabilities or disabled people as I would say many times in this podcast just to emphasize that these environments will be disabling people in many ways through inaccessible design.

So, yeah, for example, in Finland – I actually did do my homework – there was a student health survey in 2016 saying that we have roughly 6.5% of students’ self-reporting a learning difficulty. There was another publication by the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland in 2021 reporting a number of 4.8% of students self-reporting a learning disability. These kinds of numbers we would get roughly around the world. In some countries, it’s bigger, in some countries it’s lower. But, of course, the definitions differ a lot. And I think we need to be extremely critical too as well what the number tells us about the actual situation. And I think that kind of critical reflection is particularly needed in this, can we call it a post-COVID period, because we’re getting there. I’m not sure about Hong Kong. But for example, in Finland, a Finnish Student Health and Wellbeing survey in 2021, in the later part of the year, reported that one-third of higher education students self-reported symptoms of anxiety and depression. And we would have similar statistics from many other contexts. So, this goes back to the idea of an ideal student. We have these rather alarming numbers of mental health issues, general issues with student well-being stress. So, who counts as an ideal student who comes as a non-ideal student in this environment? And, yeah, these numbers we definitely need to carefully look at.

Will Brehm  6:36
It is interesting you bring up COVID and issues of mental health because here in the UK, it’s in the newspapers, we talk about it, I know at the university where I work, it’s a big issue. And so, it is quite amazing to realize how many students are self-reporting or are struggling with issues of mental illness as well as other disabilities, you know, physical as well. So, getting away from some of these numbers, let’s think through educational practice. You brought up issues of educational practice and policy. How are students with disabilities treated inside universities? Like what actually happens on a day-to-day basis for students with disabilities in the university? What do we know?

Jusso Nieminen  7:16
As I mentioned, I approached this issue from the specific angle of assessment: how student learning is assessed in higher education settings. And my dataset so far mainly comes from Finland, and that will really be the background for this. So, very briefly, of course, in different higher education contexts, institutions, we would have different kinds of models. For example, in many countries, universities would have disability centers that would take care of these students in a centralized manner. That’s not the case in Finland for example, where we have much more teacher autonomy, and much less centralized solutions to treat students with disabilities. But when I think about this, particularly from the viewpoint of teaching and assessment -so, not so much from many other crucially important view concepts of student well-being or health services- what we tend to do is that we offer assessment related adjustments or accommodations, or different words are used in different parts of the world. It tends to be rather test focused. By far the most common practices and this would be in England, or around the world, according to this review paper that I recently published. We tend to offer practices such as extra time in tests, or separate testing rooms. And these practices really tend to be centralized around tests, exams, and that is an issue that is constantly brought up by the students in my studies: that they will benefit from a more coherent form of support. But support in higher education is mostly focused on exams.

Will Brehm  8:52
The logic here is that since assessment is primarily focused on examination, if there is a student with disabilities – particularly the Finnish higher education system – they would be given additional adjustments to taking those examinations. And that typically falls in by providing more time, is that right? Are there other accommodations around assessment that might be given?

Jusso Nieminen  9:13
We might also change the format of the assessment. For example, perhaps oral presentation would be changed into an essay format. So, there are other kinds of practices as well. But the issue is that they tend to be rather technical, almost mechanical, and always quite practical. And what my main criticism is that we should be taking a bit more holistic ways of approaching the very large societal issues of inclusion and exclusion that we can’t ever tackle with something that’s purely technical and simple.

Will Brehm  9:50
One of the issues that I’m not clear about is when it comes to assessment accommodations for students with disabilities, do these accommodations differ by disability? Or is it sort of like this generic sort of like, if you have some sort of disability any disability more time is the solution to, you know, giving you proper fair assessment of your knowledge?

Jusso Nieminen  10:13
This is actually linked to my previous answer. So, the common model of thinking about this is rather medical. By which I mean, when we think about assessment adjustments, we think about certain disability types. We might talk about autism, or ADHD, or dyslexia. And then on the other hand, we have almost like a menu of practices: extra time in tests, maybe 30 minutes of extra time, or 45 minutes, or one hour, one hour and 30 minutes. And then we will try to pair up these different types of disabilities with these different kinds of practices in the menu of assessment adjustments. And you can make an analogue to medical practices. So, you have some kind of a symptom. What could we do with that? What kind of medicine or cure do you need for your symptoms? And that probably comes back to the idea of technical solutions to issues that might not actually be technical in their nature.

Will Brehm  11:04
And so, what is some of the impact of this sort of technical medicalized approach to dealing with assessment adjustments? Does this contribute to further marginalization of students?

Jusso Nieminen  11:16
It actually does, and that is exactly what my research concerns are. So, here I want to emphasize that it is very important to look at assessment adjustments from the specific viewpoint of assessment. So, we could be talking about adjustments for people with disabilities more broadly. What I argue in my research is that if we take an assessment specific view, we can understand the nuances of assessment. And this might sound obvious but it’s actually very important. To answer your question, first of all, I want to emphasize that we would always need some kinds of adjustments. No disability related research or activism would ever deny that. There’s always a need for some personalized adjustments. But the issue is that there is a huge overemphasis on these mechanical practices which has its impact on how students come to understand themselves as either ideal or rather non-ideal students. And what we know, based on research, from many, many decades, is that these adjustments that are specifically related to assessment are also related to further stigmatization and shame perceived by students with disabilities. One very practical example of this is a situation that has been reported in studies from many parts of the world, also, in my studies in Finland. It is a very academic situation where you can imagine an exam hall with students sitting in nice rows who are working on their pen and paper – this is a pandemic kind of an imagination that we are doing here – and then the time is over, and all the students leave the exam hall, except the students who have extra time in their test who stay in the hall, and who everyone can see. And this situation has been reported in research many, many times. And it is only rather recently that we’ve started to connect the dots, and also understand the social, emotional, political aspects of these kinds of situations which actually goes to issues of disability discrimination, and not just some technical individual practices.

Will Brehm  13:11
That’s a really interesting example because it begins to show how these technical solutions to an individual’s disability within an assessment situation actually sort of creates them as, I think you said in your research, as this “other” and everyone sees them, and then it does marginalize, it does discriminate. And it sort of goes against the very idea of what the accommodation was trying to prevent or help in resolve in the first place.

Jusso Nieminen  13:40
Exactly. And at the same time, we construct this idea of disability as something medicalized. And look, there would be so much work from people who’ve done this work decades before me examining different models for disability, different ways through which we understand disabilities. And there’s so much work on social, political, societal approaches to what counts as a disability, how we understand this phenomenon. But when it comes to assessment in higher education, these mechanical practices further strengthen our idea of disability as something purely psychological and medical. And that leads us into a situation where we are almost unable to see what is right in front of us. That this is also a wider social, political issue of who higher education is for and how this question might be changing as higher education massifies as is a term that is often used.

Will Brehm  14:31
So, I mean, we’ve sort of been talking a little bit about this educational practice of assessment and the technical medicalized nature of accommodations, and how that might further discrimination and marginalization of certain students with disability. And as we started, you sort of, were inferring about how this then creates a particular version of an ideal student that disabled students are not a part of, and so it sort of furthers them or others them. Are some of these ideas that exist in educational practice, are they reinforced and reproduced in the educational research that happens? I mean, because obviously, you’re working in this world of academic research. And yeah, it’s just an interesting question of like, how does education research sort of contribute, or not -sort of go against- some of the othering that happens to disabled students in the assessment practices?

Jusso Nieminen  15:19
Yeah. So, this is exactly the question that I tackled in an article where I reviewed 26 studies on assessment-specific adjustments in higher education settings. And these studies tend to be psychological in their nature, which in itself is definitely not something that I criticized. We need this kind of research. And we need this knowledge that is highly controlled, psychological studies, experiments provide -that’s needed. But at the same time, we do need to look at what kind of an image they build about student disabilities. And as we tend to conduct research through the psychological paradigm, for example, we use control groups of students with disabilities and students without disabilities. We use a lot of psychological measurements, we use statistical tools. How we come to, at the same time, construct an idea of an ideal and a non-ideal student. That’s something that I’m focusing on my research, and that is something that is not a product of mean researchers trying to frame students somewhere in a very bad light. That’s not my argument in any kind of way. Actually, it’s almost the opposite because I don’t know anything about the intentions of these researchers. And I’m almost not interested in them. What I’m saying with this piece of research is that when we take a strongly medicalized approach to studying assessment adjustments, that has its consequences, and those consequences are something that my future research will also be focusing on.

Will Brehm  16:49
I guess the more theoretical question is, how do we know that academic research that might take this psychological medicalized approach and use a particular discourse in the way it writes up findings: How do we know it actually has some sort of impact on the lived reality of students?

Jusso Nieminen  17:07
That is an excellent question. That’s the really interesting question here. I don’t have an easy answer for you. It’s a tricky thing because obviously, if I publish a research article in an academic journal, there’s no direct link between that article and what happens to some students in some higher education institute somewhere in real life. But at the same time, we’re talking about expert knowledge. And of course, it matters what kind of expert knowledge is produced about certain people. Say that we’ve learned lessons about doing this in academic research. For example, when it comes to research on people with disabilities, for a long time, we’ve had this idea of “nothing about us, without us”. And that kind of thinking is already promoted in many other fields. So, it does matter what kind of knowledge and by whom is created in scholarly research. And perhaps one thing that can be noted here is that these studies in the review, many of them were quite strongly advocating for practical impact. And as we know, that, in practice, higher education institutes often focus their assessment-related forms of support in these rather mechanical aspects. And then we have quite psychologized research advocating for more of that, and even stronger. That might have its consequences but of course it is not a direct link. But academic research is a part of a public discourse. And it does have certain kind of power in public discourse compared to many other things such as opinions, or beliefs, or so forth.

Will Brehm  18:35
I’ve been in many rooms where people say the academic research says this. And so therefore, we should do X, Y, and Z. So, I can see how that could impact directly certain educational practice and even policies that get created at the government level. The other thing that you sort of bring up that I found so interesting is in this exploration of academic literature and how it portrays students with disabilities, vis-a-vis the assessment systems in higher education, you also make this sort of argument that one of the other outcomes of this is that it reinforces the testing regime itself. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Jusso Nieminen  19:12
These studies in this review were all about exams. Even the concept of assessment adjustments was most often framed as testing adjustments or exam adjustments. And I think this is something that’s still largely correct for us as higher education, and it is connected to the massification of higher education institutions. We do need to produce measurable learning data of our students, we do need to offer grades to our students. So, here we can start to see links between what happens in assessment and what happens with assessment adjustments. The need for that objective, measured data, grades that’s needed for the purpose of employability and so we can’t get rid of those. And we know that it’s quite rare that we would have a higher education institution without that numerical assessment data. And what kinds of practices are needed to provide objective, comparable data? Well, tests and exams, they are still the king of assessment when it comes to this. And it might be that as the higher education systems expand, these kinds of not research-intensive forms of collecting the data for exams might get even more popular because it’s a very different thing to assess a large class of 1,000 students than it is to assess a tiny course with about 12 students.

Will Brehm  20:29
So, I guess, we’re sort of left with this question of what are some alternatives then? If we take your critique seriously, how would assessment and assessment accommodations – because as you say, students with disabilities need some sort of accommodation. So, what would it look like, in a way? What directions would you point to?

Jusso Nieminen  20:49
There are a couple of things I would like to mention. First of all, I think we need to critically examine the whole assessment adjustment model that we have, and the over emphasis on that. I think we need to start critically examining who these adjustments are for. Currently, we have a very medical, psychological understanding of who is worthy of these adjustments almost. In most contexts, you need some kind of a medical, psychological diagnosis to even access these practices. And some other countries such as the US, this will be quite centralized in a way that you absolutely need the diagnosis, whereas in other countries, such as Finland, the teacher might just offer you some kinds of practices just because they want to, without seeing your diagnosis. So, who are these practices for? And very much related to this, I think one way of enhancing assessment and the assessment adjustment model is simply trying to affect the cultures of higher education and the attitudes in higher education. The reason why this has been the focus of my research is that when I started my scientific career, and when I started to hear these stories from students themselves, very deep emotional stories about stigma, shame in higher education settings when it comes to, for example, learning disabilities, it really makes you think, why these specific human features are so stigmatized in academic settings. We have kind of normalized certain human characteristics. But still, we have normalized many characteristics in academia but when it comes to the overall culture of attitudes, there’s a lot of stigma. And we can just call it what it is: this is ableism in practice.

For example, I did one study where I analyzed all the documents in Finnish universities, concerning assessment adjustments, including all the web pages, all the texts, the forms the students themselves need to read if they want to access these adjustments. I could actually read a very tiny paragraph on the instructions of one university for students with disabilities who might benefit from a personalized room for testing. I think this excerpt really shows the language that we use to talk to these students as they would be something external, somewhere out there, and not members of academic communities. So, these are instructions for using this special examination rule: take your writing equipment out and hang your outdoor clothing and bag on the rack in the room. Shut down your phone and put it in your bag or in the pocket of your jacket. There can be nothing else on the table, no phone, no drinking bottle unless you have a special permission for that. Information about the approved adjustments is written on the exam envelope. It is forbidden to touch the computer, the keyboard, and the computer mouse. When I think about someone talking to me like this, because I am a member of the academic community, that would be devastating. So, this is the way that we address these students as if they would be some kind of an external non-ideal part of this bigger picture. And just changing these attitudes that we have when it comes to abilities in higher education settings. That’s already a huge thing that would affect assessment as well.

Will Brehm  23:56
I take all those points, but I want to sort of push a little more radically in a way. And this goes back to the issue of the testing regime. I mean, sure, we need comparable data to understand assessment and student – maybe academic standards or whatever – but is it possible to just sort of get rid of grading? Isn’t there this idea of like the ungrading approach to higher education? What if we just get rid of all of that sort of grading and assessment to begin with? And then we might not have to deal with some of these issues that you’re bringing up. I mean, is that too radical? Or I mean, maybe those issues will still come up in whatever system gets created, in the end?

Jusso Nieminen  24:34
Not so radical at all. Yeah! So, in my work, this is something that I’ve called assessment for inclusion. So, whenever we design assessment, we have some kinds of desirable features in mind. We want assessment to be objective or we want assessment to support student learning, or whatever. But my very basic argument is that if we want assessment to also acknowledge student diversity and inclusion, we need to meaningfully design that into assessment and practically design that idea into assessment. Because the issue when it comes to the testing regime is that it sees disabilities, or actually almost any form of student diversity as a threat, as something that obscures assessment that we need to accommodate. We need to get rid of that in order to keep the validity of that regime. And this is not only a matter of disabilities but a matter of student diversity more broadly. So, I wouldn’t say that what you said is too radical at all. I think it would actually benefit the whole academic community if we would come up with ways of assessment that would celebrate the diversity that we have in academic communities.

Will Brehm  25:37
By way of conclusion here, like, is there an example that you can point to where that is possible or where that has happened? And you know, like, what would that actually look like in assessment, to design assessment including the diversity of different types of students into the actual assessment process from the beginning rather than accommodating them at the end for validity purposes.

Jusso Nieminen  25:57
First of all, we have so much research on what kind of assessment supports student learning. So much! Decades and decades and decades of research on practices such as self-assessment, peer assessment, portfolios, e-portfolios, student sense of feedback, cyclical feedback that allows students to use feedback in practice and develop their thinking while they’re doing that. They have so much knowledge but actually, it hasn’t been easy to bring that knowledge and actually use that in practice in higher education, which I understand, as a teacher in higher education, there are certain norms that govern my work in a way that I can’t actually even use some principles from my own research when I assess my students. So, bringing that knowledge about something that we call assessment for learning, bringing that in practice will already be an inclusive way of enhancing assessment. But that’s not a very radical thing. I’m just saying that we should do what research knows works. What perhaps is a bit more radical, which goes to your comment about un-grading, getting rid of grades, yeah, I’d love to support that. Let’s just get rid of them. They take a lot of time for academics to provide grades and justify them. We could use the time in a much more productive way. Student learning is the goal of higher education. There’s some brilliant work by Trina Jorre de St Jorre about assessment for distinctiveness, which means that grades stay at what they are, are numerical values that tell very little to the students about what they know, what they have learned but they tell even less to future employers about the actual capabilities of the student. So, they are actually a very bad form of communication, they decontextualize some very contextual knowledge about student learning skills, abilities. So, if we would replace grades with ways that celebrate student diversity by showing what the students actually know. So, we would have some kinds of academic standards, learning criteria, and then some kind of a way of communicating students’ development, learning, becoming in higher education while reflecting on those criteria.

What that might mean in practice is, for example, an e-portfolio, which is not a radical practice, per se, because we have, again, decades of work on e-portfolios. Actually, a recent literature review that even included studies on the late 90s, where there is a diskette where you store your e-portfolio. This is not a new thing, and it is not a radical thing. But actually, when you bring that to the context of grading, and certifying student knowledge, and learning, it is a radical idea. That we would have some kind of a way of demonstrating that knowledge in a much more diverse way. But what that would mean in terms of comparable data, objective data that I guess these institutions need to be able to provide? I don’t know. But it might also be beneficial for the workplaces when they have applicants. Because, I mean, we tend to think about grading as something that is needed for the future workforce. I tend to be critical towards that idea as well but even from this viewpoint, whether in the workplace, once we know more about students’ actual skills rather than seeing something like a GPA, which might tell you about something, but it’s an average of random numbers that hopefully are based on something rather reliable. But it’s not a statistical measurement in any kind of way.

And one final thing that is perhaps the most important thing when we think about practical ways of enhancing inclusivity of assessment is that we should include students themselves in this design process. This is something very important. Assessment has a long history of being kind of a technical measurement process. And what we have in measurement is someone measuring someone. So, what we know in much more modern assessment literature is that when students are not only seen as objects of assessment but very much active participants in the assessment, that enhances student learning. Well, a similar idea can be used in an even more radical way: to invite students and also students from marginalized backgrounds to come and co-design assessments together with teachers, together with pedagogical developers in higher education institutions. And this would also be one panacea for only seeing students with disabilities through that medicalized point of view. They could actually have some agency over their own assessment, which might, in the process, even benefit the content knowledge. When you need to take part of the assessment co-design process, you also need to think about very concrete things such as what is knowledge in my field? That will be very different in chemistry, creative arts, architecture. How can I assess that knowledge? What kinds of practices work for that? When students are taking part of these processes, we know that it’s good for student learning but what that might also do for the inclusivity of assessment, there are so many opportunities there.

Will Brehm  30:50
Wow! There’s so much more to think through but I hope we can draw on some of that research and reimagine forms of assessment and start by making assessment inclusive from the very beginning. I mean, it’s a lot to think about, and hopefully we can start changing some practices around the world. Jusso Nieminen, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Just an absolute pleasure to have you on.

Jusso Nieminen  31:12
Thank you so much for having me.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

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Access and Participation of Students with Disabilities: The Challenge for Higher Education

Students with Disabilities in Higher Education: A Review of Literature

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Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com