10.17605/OSF.IO/9CJRK
Michael Wu
Michael
Wu
https://osf.io/5b3ce/
New York University
New York University
A study of self-affirmation on secondary school students with hearing impairment in Nepal
Open Science Framework
2022
Social Psychology
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Psychology
self-affirmation
social psychology
wise intervention
Open Science Framework
https://ror.org/05d5mza29/
https://grid.ac/institutes/grid.466501.0/
2022-03-03
2022-06-01
2022-08-30
Pre-registration
MIT License
In recent years, significant progress has been made towards ensuring equality in the education of children with disabilities in Nepal. The 2017 Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination and violence based on disability (Holmes et al., 2018; Prasai & Pant, 2018), and there are more than 350 inclusive education classes and 35 special education schools across the country (UNICEF, 2018).
However, children with disabilities are still more likely to be susceptible to the lack of awareness of stigma in their learning settings and the lack of personalized tools to deal with daily stressors (Bizzego et al., 2020). In the 2021 report from the Disability Inclusive Development Programme, Nepalese children with disabilities are found to be at a higher risk of 1) lack of access to formal education, 2) being bullied and discriminated against and less likely to make and maintain friends, 3) low expectation and physical punishment from teachers for poor performance, and 4) dropping out of school due to negative attitudes about the capability of children with disabilities to learn.
Recognizing educational and psychological challenges for children with disabilities, various organizations have pushed for a strong response towards ensuring children with disabilities have opportunities to attend school and engage in learning in a safe environment. The Inclusive Education Initiative (IEI) is a multi-donor trust fund (MDTF) at the World Bank (WB), launched in 2019 with support from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) and the UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID). The IEI invests in catalytic technical expertise and knowledge resources that will support countries in making education progressively inclusive for children with disabilities. The IEI has three pillars of activities: (i) in-country interventions in three countries, (ii) development of global public goods, and (iii) innovation funding. Nepal is one of the countries selected for IEI support to advance the educational participation and learning of children with disabilities.
As a part of the in-country interventions, the Nepal education team aims to adapt and study a brief social-psychological intervention called Self-Affirmation for students with disabilities in secondary special education schools in Nepal. Over the past two decades, social psychologists have been arguing against the idea that students of disadvantaged social groups underperform due to their “innate group weakness” (Silverman & Cohen, 2014). Rather, the immediate social context where students are situated provides sources of stereotype threats that they may perceive as attacks on their group identities. Because stereotype threat takes a psychological form, it is possible to alleviate it with strategies that address how students think and feel in their learning settings. A well-studied technique of reducing stereotype threats is self-affirmation: a brief exercise in which students reflect for about 10-20 minutes on their cherished personal values that transcend the evaluative situation.
In this study, we aim to conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) testing the effectiveness of the self-affirmation intervention on deaf children's perceived stereotype threat and learning in three special deaf schools in Nepal.