| dc.description.abstract | Persons with disabilities are a sizable minority in the United States, yet, there is sparse work on children’s and adults’ concepts of disability. Study 1 of this dissertation investigated children’s evaluations of and reasoning about classroom accommodations for children with physical and cognitive disabilities. Children saw stories where characters engaged in accommodation-related behavior (e.g., doing less classwork than other kids), evaluated how fair the behaviors were, and provided their reasoning about the behaviors. Nine-year-olds evaluated accommodations as significantly fairer than 5- and 7-year-olds. Across the age range, mentioning characters’ needs was associated with evaluating accommodations as fairer. Study 2 tested children’s and adults’ intuitions about intra-sensory dynamics for persons with a sensory impairment. In Study 2A, adults read vignettes about persons who varied in the strength of their vision or hearing, and rated the strength of those persons’ other senses. Participants demonstrated compensatory intuitions; e.g., persons with total or moderate vision loss were expected to have heightened hearing, and vice versa. In Study 2B, 5- to 10-year-olds’ intuitions about intra-sensory dynamics were investigated with vignettes (similar to Study 2A), as well as stories in which an object goes missing in the dark and children chose between a character who cannot see or a typically sighted character to find the object. Preliminary results suggest that, unlike adults, children demonstrated modest halo effects—characters with visual impairments were expected to have other sensory impairments and were less often selected to find missing objects. | |
