Developments in Children's Evaluations of and Reasoning About Disability-Related Accommodations

Abstract

Children with disabilities often receive accommodations, but teachers rarely explain them to typically-developing (TD) classmates. How do TD students reason about these accommodations and evaluate their fairness? Five-, seven-, and nine-year-olds from the United States (N = 122; 50% female; 87.7% white; data collected April 2022 - September 2023) heard stories where a child character with a cognitive or physical disability engaged with a cognitive or physical accommodation. Participants explained why the child engaged in the accommodation and evaluated the accommodation's fairness. Nine-year-olds judged accommodations to be significantly fairer than 5-year-olds. In their explanations, the oldest children mentioned characters' needs significantly more, whereas the youngest children mentioned characters' motives significantly more. Mentioning characters' needs predicted evaluating accommodations as fairer, and mentioning characters' motives predicted evaluating accommodations as less fair.