Defining Disability: Reviewing the Construct of Special Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is common within Ontario’s educational context to hear the term ‘special needs’ or ‘special education’. However, the relationship between language, definitions, and discourse in the treatment of students with disabilities in Ontario's elementary and secondary schools is understudied. Drawing on an extensive body of literature from the sociology of education, disability studies, and special needs education, this paper aims to recognize the profound influence of language and labels on societal perceptions and the treatment of students with disabilities. While investigating the historical definitions of disability, literature in this area highlights the continuous debate and inconsistencies surrounding terminology in academic and educational contexts. By focusing on the often-used term "special needs", this research examines the potential negative impact of this label on reinforcing ableism and prejudices for students with disabilities. Moreover, language, definitions, and discourse have the power to shape perceptions and, if not used thoughtfully, may inadvertently perpetuate negative stereotypes and hinder students' academic and social development. Therefore, educational terminology should be altered to reflect equitable decision-making and dignity throughout supports for students.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".