Specific learning disorders: Teachers’ beliefs, attitudes and representations
Michela Moretti, Valentina Tobia
The field of Specific Learning Disorders (SLDs) has seen significant advancements in research which, however, struggle to be directly implemented into day-to-day practices and activities in schools. One of the reasons for this criticality may be the influence that teachers’ explicit and implicit beliefs and representations regarding SLDs have on their educational and teaching practices. The present article explores this issue with a narrative review of literature. Although law 170/10 guarantees both equal rights for students with SLDs and specific training for teachers, school staff hold several erroneous beliefs which undermine this aim. Often, these beliefs are related to the aetiology of the disorder and they are accompanied by implicit negative representations of students with SLDs. Moreover, SLDs are still a controversial topic, therefore teachers tend to give socially desirable answers in self-report measures; implicit measures might be better in assessing teachers’ actual attitudes towards students with SLDs. Future studies should combine implicit and explicit measures in order to assess the cultural factors, cognitive biases and implicit representations that influence teachers, and how these may affect their behaviour in the classroom. This review can offer insights in order to improve teachers’ approach to students with SLDs. We suggest this can be achieved by raising awareness of teachers’ own representations and of how these could negatively impact their behaviour towards students with SLDs.
Keywords
SLD, Teachers, Representations, Implied Measures, Explicit Measures.
