Page 174 - Vseživljenjsko učenje kot temelj trajnostne družbe

Maja Lebeničnik and Karmen Drljić

Limitations and Future Research
Ableism is an important construct in inclusive education and should be more
widely researched in the future. Measuring ableism faces the same problems
as measuring any other kind of prejudices. There is a great possibility for con-
scious or unconscious biases when self-assessing and self-reporting preju-
dices. Our study revealed that future educators who will most probably work
with vulnerable groups reported lower levels of ableism than their peers in
other education programmes. Unfortunately, our study does not answer why
thesedifferencesoccurredbetween studentsofdifferent studyprogrammes.
One of the major limitations of our study is that we did not clearly distinguish
between students who had already covered special education topics during
their studies and those who had not. Although we measured participants’
self-assessed knowledge of these topics, assessing the actual extent of this
content during their previous study process would provide a better under-
standing of the curriculum’s contribution to ableism. Future studies should
examine which elements of curriculum contribute to lower ableism, as this
canbeapart of thesolution.
Future studies on the topic should focus on measuring ableism in differ-
ent ways (e.g. implicitly, in vignette-style questionnaires). Also, further re-
search is needed for identifying ableism, specifically in educational settings,
and discovering factors contributing to ableism. Mindset was not confirmed
as a (strong) predictor for any facet of ableism, but mindset related to more
specific attributes may be more predictive for ableism.

Conclusion
One of the main findings of our study is that future educators, enrolled in
study programmes where they gain more knowledge about special needs
and possibly have more personal experiences, report lower levels of ableism
than their peers. One of the main aims of our study was also to assess the role
of mindset in the manifestation of ableism. The development of the theoreti-
calunderpinningforthisconnection isstillin itsearlystages.Thisstudyisone
of the first to empirically research the possible connection. Unfortunately,
mindset about intellectual abilities is not a strong predictor of ableism, pre-
dicting only personal responsibility, a facet of ableism that is per se very sim-
ilar to the concept of growth mindset.

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency [P5-0444] Vseživ-
ljenjsko učenje za trajnostno družbo prihodnosti.

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