Introduction
Nursing educators agree that students with learning disabilities do not just outgrow them. Some of the students turn into adults with learning disabilities, while many take part in nursing education programs. The education of students with learning disabilities poses great difficulty for the majority of parents and educators (Marsden, Green, March, & Ledington, 2012). Many of the students are educated at a tender age on the best approaches of processing information and developing an organized strategy or policy when dealing with the challenges.
Learning difficulty has just of late been categorized as a form of disability. Students with learning disabilities encounter challenges in organizing information obtained, recalling it, and expressing information, and thus, influence an individual’s basic operations, for instance, the ability to read, write, understand, and reason. Regardless of the challenges, students with learning disabilities can be taught through successful learning strategies that will assist them in working on learning more productively.
Learning Disabilities
Learning disabilities could interfere with a learner satisfying her or his academic and life possibility. Learning disabilities lead to unanticipated educational attainment. They might affect the possession, organization, comprehension, maintenance, and application of the information. Learning disabilities are intricate and may progress past the stereotypical perceptions of the disability as merely reading challenges.
They differ considerably, both with respect to the roles they influence and the asperity of the influence encountered (Billings & Halstead, 2013). The suitable adjustments rely on the person’s strong points, in addition to his/her particular challenges. Commonly, learning disabilities are not noticed prior to the children beginning school. The majority of nursing students with learning disabilities show no indications of challenges, except while trying the particular educational duties that impinge on their specific field of cognitive processing intricacy.
Different from most other forms of disability, the recognition of learning disability offers some kinds of challenges because processing problems are tested via presumption anchored in student reactions. It may not be self-evident that the learning problems of students are attributable to learning disabilities.
The particular requirements of students with learning disabilities vary, and their knowledge may advance with time (Billings & Halstead, 2013). However, this does not imply that the disabilities are no more, but by changing the tasks they embark on, and the policies they instigate to tackle their specific learning disabilities, students might encounter varying problems at different instances. Attributable to personal dissimilarities, no particular explanation or expression can characterize every person with a learning disability.
Because learning disabilities happen along with a range of severeness, students can encounter gentle to considerable effects. Students having learning disabilities express average to above-average intelligence and ability, and when they show unanticipated underachievement when judged against their capabilities, they can encounter educational triumph and live joyful, flourishing lives. Self-advocacy assists learners in attaining greater self-awareness, stronger self-worth and, inviolable self-determination. Students are most likely to experience triumph in nursing education if they comprehend and be acquainted with the manner in which they can explicate their disabilities, elucidate the adjustments that back their education and obtain the help of educators to aid them in steering their school practice.
Early recognition and intervention and suitable adaptations and assistance are vital to achievement (Bollard & Parkes, 2012). If the performance of a student is evaluated in the non-existence of suitable adaptations, the testing might not precisely determine the intelligence of the student. The achievement of students having learning disabilities does not imply that the disorder has cleared. It signifies that the student makes a successful application of strengths and compensatory policies to realize individual and academic objectives.
Students that have learning disabilities could show ordinary or superior intelligence, though they as well have higher information-comprehension shortfalls that make them operate considerably poorer in a given educational field (for example, mathematics, writing, or reading) as compared to what may be anticipated, given their intellectual capacity and excellence in other educational fields. Although every learning disability is different, students experiencing learning disabilities report some common problems, encompassing sluggish and ineffective reading, sluggish writing of essays, challenges in organization and the technicalities of writing, and recurrent mistakes in mathematical computations.
Nursing Education and Students with Learning Disabilities
Educating students with learning disabilities entails having a comprehension of kinds of disabilities, which are many (Ashcroft & Lutfiyya, 2013). A number of the disabilities mainly witnessed are dyslexia (incapability to read accurately), dyscalculia (incapability of mathematical interpretation), audial, and visual challenges. In general, a child that has learning disabilities encounter challenges in studying proficiencies, writing proficiencies, oral proficiencies, reading expertise, mathematical skillfulness, and social adroitness.
In nursing education, students with learning disabilities encounter incapability to manage time and are thus unable to complete assigned tasks on time, and they have difficulty taking notes and observing directives. They normally have challenges spelling appropriately and make recurrent grammatical mistakes that lead to poor sentence formation and poor chirography. If the educator talks fast, students with learning disabilities will have problems comprehending and remembering the statements.
They are normally slow learners and, at times, have the wrong understanding and poor memory. Perplexity with mathematical symbols is common, in addition to problems with conceptions of time and finances. The realization of the failures leads to poor self-worth, which highly influences the students’ social proficiencies.
Learners with disabilities ensure a distinctive viewpoint and set of proficiencies that have the unexploited perspective to change the nursing career through the enhancement of culturally germane and effective care to every patient. Similar to the manner in which race and ethnic groups are associated with the excellence of medical care, learners with disabilities can improve culturally, in addition to linguistically applicable medical care (Ashcroft & Lutfiyya, 2013).
In the medical profession, learners with disabilities are normally observed from a shortfall point of view, and nursing teachers, practitioners, and researchers have not methodically mulled over the way of handling students with disabilities since medical personnel could also better communication between medical staff and the patients. This harmony could also lead to enhanced patient involvement in care, greater extents of patient fulfillment, more precautionary care, and improved medical results.
Through methodically reflecting on the multiple approaches in which considerable trailblazers and managers of learners with disabilities frequently, by merit of the problems they encountered, played vital tasks in their capability to attain prominence and change communities, educators can start observing students with disabilities from a positive standpoint. For instance, Florence Nightingale, normally deemed the bearer of contemporary nursing, had a physical disability, and was mostly restrained to her bed.
Moreover, the initiator of the American Red Cross Organization (ARCO), Clara Barton, attained extensive credit for her efforts in health care irrespective of having a speech disability. With the latest legal modifications influencing learners with disabilities, nursing, as a career, has a different chance to make way for considerable social transformation for students with learning disabilities (Dupler, Allen, Maheady, Fleming, & Allen, 2012).
Educating students with learning disabilities could be simplified (Dupler et al., 2012). Numerous ways to triumph encompass posing inquiries in an elucidative style and then having the students with learning disabilities express their comprehension of the inquiries, offering a comprehensive course syllabus prior to starting of classes, application of projectors having an outline of the message or topic of the day, and decreasing course tasks for learners with learning disabilities. Other ways include offering clear copies of notes as well as overhead transparencies if the learners benefit from such policies, ensuring that learners have course outlines or study guidebooks that prompt them to major details in their readings, and posing inquiries in a manner that assists the learners achieve self-confidence.
Nursing educators and leaders are establishing the requirement to formulate systems to satisfy the diverse requirements of populations as the societies become progressively multicultural as well as multilingual (Bollard & Parkes, 2012). The materialization of cultural competence in the medical field tries to handle the aspects that result in disparities in medical services and modify services to satisfy the social, cultural, and linguistic requirements of the students.
Nurse educators are making efforts to prepare the nursing workforce to satisfy the requirements of the increasing diversity of students. There is a need to have diverse nursing personnel for the suitable provision of quality care and patient safety. Studies affirm that Hispanic and Black Americans desired obtaining care from caregivers of their ethnic backgrounds due to personal choice and language, not merely out of geographic convenience.
Moreover, nurse educators affirm that learning is improved because of working or learning in diverse settings and operating with co-workers from dissimilar cultural settings. Nursing students with learning disabilities had enhanced learning when they interrelated with faculty and colleague learners that had diverse settings. Since learning disabilities cut across every race and culture, policies should be implemented in an attempt to raise the number of caregivers with disabilities that may back more successful communication in the medical delivery structure for people with and with no disability.
Though research demonstrates an under-representation of some ethnic groups in the medical personnel, just a few studies have strongly focused on nursing education for students with learning disabilities. Diversity with regard to disability type remains a problematical difficulty in nursing education. In spite of the fundamental significance of students with dissimilar cultural settings to develop the nursing career, nurse educators are too frequently upholding historical approaches, principles, and processes that eliminate learners with disabilities from getting admittance, classifying themselves as students with learning disabilities, or graduating from schools of nursing.
According to the standpoint of a social model, the kind of disability is more of a liability as compared to the students’ ethnic backgrounds or sex and could foster a novel set of understanding, proficiencies, and capabilities in the nursing career. Nurses with disabilities have the likelihood of enhancing nursing care and ensuring the provision of the best care due to their exceptional comprehension of disability concerns (Bollard & Parkes, 2012).
Nursing educators require being attentive that their next top student might be an individual with a learning disability. Instances of learners with learning disabilities that achieve nursing proficiencies with time and having inadequate assistance from practical accommodations act as demonstrations of the inventiveness and compensatory capabilities that the learners with disabilities normally hold. After admission, the learners with learning disabilities should not be immediately necessitated to express proficiencies that nursing learners normally show and develop with time. Instead of jumping to conclusions, nurse educators, leaders, and personnel nurses ought to give them a friendly welcome (Ashcroft & Lutfiyya, 2013). All the stakeholders should honor the fortitude and factual purpose of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Nurse educators should assist students with learning disabilities become triumphant and fruitful elements of the nursing career. Currently, the professional tasks under the responsibilities of nurses are immense and extensive, from ordinary nursing and critical care unit nursing to phone assessment and pharmaceutical deals (Ashcroft & Lutfiyya, 2013). In a career that provides such a diversity of chances, learners with learning disabilities can ensure significant proficiencies, for instance, empathy, reading of the lips, sign language, and personal encounters from which both coworkers and patients can gain knowledge.
Nursing students that have learning disabilities require the backing of the nurse educators to become triumphant. When the students eventually graduate and secure employment in the nursing field, they might operate differently, but ultimately they generate significance to the nursing career and the care of the patients. Jointly, nurse educators and other stakeholders can offer the learners the opportunity they deserve.
Teaching
One way of educating nursing students with learning disabilities is through differentiated instruction. This is a flexible means of teaching where the educators plan and accomplish different advances such as handling content, learning practices, learning technique, practical methods, management policies, and evaluation devices. It leads to a more individualized, practical learning atmosphere, comprising of a broad range of students.
There are different facets of differentiated instruction that nursing educators could employ. When nurse educators employ differentiated instruction, they offer learners the environment to capitalize on their strengths, improve on their weaknesses, and encounter appropriate remediation. This allows the learners to make use of effective learning policies as they start to comprehend their personal learning styles, interests, requirements, and engage with their education.
In this regard, the motivation of the learners is enhanced. The different facets of differentiated instructions are deemed complementary to each other and not mutually restricted or opposing (Oermann & Gaberson, 2013). When used jointly, the different facets of differentiated instruction offer valuable well-designed training, in addition to intervention, for every learner. The differentiated instruction offers successful interventions for learners with learning disabilities.
Testing
When mulling over the testing of nursing students with learning disabilities, nurse educators ought to take into consideration the scarcity of effective approaches, the significance of engaging the students in the testing practice, and the reality that testing is beneficial just to the level that it assists the learners gain more knowledge. It is vital that testing be employed just as a component (and possibly not the greatest significant section) of an extensive assessment progression.
The assessment progression is more beneficial when the students contribute information regarding personal objectives and education strengths and flaws (Oermann & Gaberson, 2013). The information itself is not the most essential but changing the practice from testing to gaining knowledge and difficulty resolving raises the contribution of the students and could reduce the unconstructive characteristics of testing.
The application of testing approaches to establish whether students with learning disabilities gain has limited significance if the knowledge acquired is not utilized, for example, setting instructions to assist the learners profit or ensure that they are in a position of handling resources and services. In this regard, the benefits of having recognized students with learning disabilities have to be assessed alongside the unconstructive impacts of testing and classification.
Nurse educators should seek ways of utilizing more complicated learning practices to satisfy the requirements of students devoid of conveying labels. Nurse educators could also employ formative assessment, a model that employs response from the continuous examining of the improvement of students to discover learning intensities and faults and to channel instruction, allowing the educators discover the requirements of the learners and strategize accordingly. The testing sequence is continuous and entails evaluating what learners can address and requires knowing (Marsden et al., 2012). Testing should consider what learners require as well as learning approaches and concerns when strategizing suitable instructional methods and resources.
Grading
Nurse educators ought to explore the possible existence of learning disabilities when learners who show capability have an account of fighting with particular elements of school and start to show behavioral challenges. Learners that have unnoticed learning disabilities may show detrimental conduct for a range of explanations (Oermann & Gaberson, 2013). They may feel irritated, depressed, lonely, upset, or discouraged because of concentrating on their challenges.
Frustration could occur due to the learners’ degree of performance when judged against their degree of real capability, lack of comprehension of the reasons behind their efforts to carry out the duties or at times the failure to communicate in a suitable manner. Students with learning disabilities could demonstrate unsuitable conduct in an attempt to evade the frustrating assignment. In other cases, conduct could emanate from poor self-esteem associated with the concentration of the students on what they can or cannot accomplish, or learners may stop aiming high, considering that no matter the much they struggle, they will not achieve triumph.
Other conducts could be the outcome of a psychological commotion. Nevertheless, regardless of the learning challenges materializing, learners with learning disabilities could encounter triumph in school if suitable supports are offered. It is significant to center on timely recognition and remediation and utilize research-anchored, successful policies to help learners prior to the emergence of behavioral or psychological concerns.
However, nurse educators are not supposed to deteriorate the academic excellence of the nursing course through offering passing grades to learners that have not shown the necessary degree of knowledge or excellent performance. After offering the tests, nurse educators ought to grade the tasks of the students with learning disabilities as they would rate the tasks of the other learners. After the learners with learning disabilities have embarked on the tests, there is no point of giving them a break through being excessively lenient. Moreover, grading some learners more strictly since they have had the benefit of more time, or other instructional alterations, would weaken the significance of testing and grading (Marsden et al., 2012).
Evaluation
In the nursing profession, there has been debate regarding the value of different fields and groups. For instance, some nursing organizations have published regarding learners with learning disabilities being deprived of admittance in nursing schools. Such arguments affirm that the graduates of nursing schools are not anticipated to acquire every technical proficiency and accommodation and in some instances options ought to be evaluated (Marsden et al., 2012).
For instance, a future nurse with learning disability ought to show optional ways of acquiring, conveying, and using the information. With respect to certain motor proficiencies that encompass carrying out auscultation, studies affirm that it is not essential to conduct all processes independently, but that learners ought to have the capacity to discover and express the style entailed and apply the outcomes. Regardless of a number of controversies, nurse educators evaluate the needs of students with learning disabilities and put efforts to assist them succeed. Nonetheless, in the modern intricate medical setting, issues such as motor and observation might not demonstrate the cognitive, communication, and management proficiencies required for nursing experts.
Learners with learning disabilities might have had accommodation formerly, normally have thoughts on what does and what does not thrive for them, and are used to handling the essentials of accommodations. Nurse educators ought to build up practical values taking into deliberation what is fundamental for completion of the nursing course successfully (Marsden et al., 2012). Technological values ought to be attached to what is taught in the syllabus and what is necessary for graduation. Technical values ought to handle what the course and career entail instead of the capacity to undertake some particular tasks.
Technical values ought to mull over the evaluation of the overall capability and not the given means of the manifestation of capability. The perception of the nursing exercise from evaluation, in addition to the holistic viewpoint, will permit educators, leaders, and the administrators to consider every nurse with a learning disability as a treasured expert that has the ability of practicing safely, offering innovative care in their field of specialization, and benefitting from their profession. With progressively more graduates and nurses with learning disabilities, there will be an advancement of the nursing practice with novel means of offering care.
Conclusion
Nursing educators have the same opinion that students with learning disabilities do not merely outgrow them. The edification of students with learning disabilities generates a great intricacy to many parents and educators. Learning difficulty has barely of late been grouped as a form of disability. Irrespective of the challenges, students with learning disabilities can be trained through triumphant learning strategies that will aid them work on learning more fruitfully. Learning disabilities could hinder a learner from gratifying her or his academic and life opportunities. Usually, learning disabilities are not perceived prior to the children beginning school.
Most nursing students with learning disabilities illustrate no signs of challenges, except while attempting the particular educational duties that have an effect on their specific field of learning. Self-advocacy supports learners manage greater self-awareness, stronger personality and, firm autonomy. Timely acknowledgment and involvement and proper adaptations and aid are vital to triumph. There is a need to have varied nursing personnel for the proper provision of quality care and patient safety.
Since learning disabilities affect any race and society, policies should be executed in an attempt to increase the number of caregivers with disabilities that might back more triumphant communication in the medical delivery formation for persons with and with no disability. Through such things as teaching, testing, grading, and evaluation, nurse educators should assist students with learning disabilities become victorious and fruitful personnel in the nursing career.
References
Ashcroft, T. J., & Lutfiyya, Z. M. (2013). Nursing educators’ perspectives of students with disabilities: A grounded theory study. Nurse education today, 33(11), 1316-1321.
Billings, D. M., & Halstead, J. A. (2013). Teaching in nursing: A guide for faculty. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier Health Sciences.
Bollard, M., Lahiff, J., & Parkes, N. (2012). Involving people with learning disabilities in nurse education: Towards an inclusive approach. Nurse education today, 32(2), 173-177.
Dupler, A. E., Allen, C., Maheady, D. C., Fleming, S. E., & Allen, M. (2012). Leveling the playing field for nursing students with disabilities: implications of the amendments to the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Journal of nursing education, 51(3), 140-144.
Marsden, D., Green, A., March, T., & Ledington, S. (2012). The role of technology in learning disability nursing: Daniel Marsden and colleagues report on how a group of students has used social networking media to form deeper bonds with clients and interact with members of their team. Learning Disability Practice, 15(3), 28-30.
Oermann, M. H., & Gaberson, K. B. (2013). Evaluation and testing in nursing education (4th ed.). New York: Springer Publishing Company.