Amplifying Voices: Postsecondary Education Pathway Experiences Of Students With Down Syndrome
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a need to destabilize ableist views in educational systems and deficit-based biomedical approaches that portend that very few students with Down syndrome are capable of attending college and university. This qualitative research study centers on the lived experiences of students with Down syndrome in understanding the critical factors that influence postsecondary education pathways and experiences. Data from separate, semi-structured interviews with students and parents from across Canada and the United States garnered twenty-five personal student narratives. The study reflects over twenty different degree-granting and inclusive postsecondary programs at colleges and universities. Discussion focuses on the dynamic tension between how disability is constructed within social, cultural and political spheres and deconstructed by individual advocacy aimed at reducing stigma and discrimination towards people with Down syndrome. Even with the increasing number of programs for students with intellectual disabilities in postsecondary institutions, findings indicate that disabling barriers such as admissions criteria, funding and attitudes can thwart access for students. By rejecting the deficit model dominant in education, students express benefits of their postsecondary experiences that include increased independence, self-esteem, socialization and employable skills. Evidence inculcates the important presence and self-advocacy of students with Down syndrome in higher education along with strong family advocacy to confront disabling school policies, practices and attitudes so that intellectual disability can be reconceptualized and roadblocks dismantled to increase postsecondary opportunities that did not exist mere decades ago for the Down syndrome population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".