importance of research in humanities

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What is Humanities Research?

Research in the humanities is frequently misunderstood. When we think of research, what immediately comes to mind for many of us is a laboratory setting, with white-coated scientists hunched over microscopes. Because research in the humanities is often a rather solitary activity, it can be difficult for newcomers to gain a sense of what research looks like within the scope of English Studies. (For examples, see Student Research Profiles .)

A common misconception about research is reinforced when we view it solely in terms of the discovery of things previously unknown (such as a new species or an archaelogical artifact) rather than as a process that includes the reinterpretation or rediscovery of known artifacts (such as texts and other cultural products) from a critical or creative perspective to generate innovative art or new analyses. Fundamental to the concept of research is precisely this creation of something new. In the humanities, this might consist of literary authorship, which creates new knowledge in the form of art, or scholarly research, which adds new knowledge by examining texts and other cultural artifacts in the pursuit of particular lines of scholarly inquiry.

Research is often narrowly construed as an activity that will eventually result in a tangible product aimed at solving a world or social problem. Instead, research has many aims and outcomes and is a discipline-specific process, based upon the methods, conventions, and critical frameworks inherent in particular academic areas. In the humanities, the products of research are predominantly intellectual and intangible, with the results contributing to an academic discipline and also informing other disciplines, a process which often effects individual or social change over time.

The University of Washington Undergraduate Research Program provides this basic definition of research:

"Very generally speaking, most research is characterized by the evidence-based exploration of a question or hypothesis that is important to those in the discipline in which the work is being done. Students, then, must know something about the research methodology of a discipline (what constitutes "evidence" and how do you obtain it) and how to decide if a question or line of inquiry that is interesting to that student is also important to the discipline, to be able to embark on a research project."

While individual research remains the most prevalent form in the humanities, collaborative and cross-disciplinary research does occur. One example is the "Modern Girl Around the World" project, in which a group of six primary UW researchers from various humanities and social sciences disciplines explored the international emergence of the figure of the Modern Girl in the early 20th century. Examples of other research clusters are "The Race/Knowledge Project: Anti-Racist Praxis in the Global University," "The Asian American Studies Research Cluster," " The Queer + Public + Performance Project ," " The Moving Images Research Group ," to name a few.

English Studies comprises, or contains elements of, many subdisciplines. A few examples of areas in which our faculty and students engage are Textual Studies , Digital Humanities , American Studies , Language and Rhetoric , Cultural Studies , Critical Theory , and Medieval Studies . Each UW English professor engages in research in one or more specialty areas. You can read about English faculty specializations, research, and publications in the English Department Profiles to gain a sense of the breadth of current work being performed by Department researchers.

Undergraduates embarking on an independent research project work under the mentorship of one or more faculty members. Quite often this occurs when an advanced student completes an upper-division class and becomes fascinated by a particular, more specific line of inquiry, leading to additional investigation in an area beyond the classroom. This also occurs when students complete the English Honors Program , which culminates in a guided research-based thesis. In order for faculty members to agree to mentor a student, the project proposal must introduce specific approaches and lines of inquiry, and must be deemed sufficiently well defined and original enough to contribute to the discipline. If a faculty member in English has agreed to support your project proposal and serve as your mentor, credit is available through ENGL 499.

Beyond English Department resources, another source of information is the UW Undergraduate Research Program , which sponsors the annual Undergraduate Research Symposium . They also offer a one-credit course called Research Exposed (GEN ST 391) , in which a variety of faculty speakers discuss their research and provide information about research methods. Another great campus resource is the Simpson Center for the Humanities which supports interdisciplinary study. A number of our students have also been awarded Mary Gates Research Scholarships .

Each year, undergraduate English majors participate in the UW's Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium as well as other symposia around the nation. Here are some research abstracts from the symposia proceedings archive by recent English-major participants.

UW English Majors Recently Presenting at the UW's Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium

For additional examples, see Student Profiles and Past Honors Students' Thesis Projects .

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Home » Humanities Research – Types, Methods and Examples

Humanities Research – Types, Methods and Examples

Table of Contents

Humanities Research

Definition:

Humanities research is a systematic and critical investigation of human culture, values, beliefs, and practices, including the study of literature, philosophy, history, art, languages, religion, and other aspects of human experience.

Types of Humanities Research

Types of Humanities Research are as follows:

Historical Research

This type of research involves studying the past to understand how societies and cultures have evolved over time. Historical research may involve examining primary sources such as documents, artifacts, and other cultural products, as well as secondary sources such as scholarly articles and books.

Cultural Studies

This type of research involves examining the cultural expressions and practices of a particular society or community. Cultural studies may involve analyzing literature, art, music, film, and other forms of cultural production to understand their social and cultural significance.

Linguistics Research

This type of research involves studying language and its role in shaping cultural and social practices. Linguistics research may involve analyzing the structure and use of language, as well as its historical development and cultural variations.

Anthropological Research

This type of research involves studying human cultures and societies from a comparative and cross-cultural perspective. Anthropological research may involve ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, interviews, and other qualitative research methods.

Philosophy Research

This type of research involves examining fundamental questions about the nature of reality, knowledge, morality, and other philosophical concepts. Philosophy research may involve analyzing philosophical texts, conducting thought experiments, and engaging in philosophical discourse.

Art History Research

This type of research involves studying the history and significance of art and visual culture. Art history research may involve analyzing the formal and aesthetic qualities of art, as well as its historical context and cultural significance.

Literary Studies Research

This type of research involves analyzing literature and other forms of written expression. Literary studies research may involve examining the formal and structural qualities of literature, as well as its historical and cultural context.

Digital Humanities Research

This type of research involves using digital technologies to study and analyze cultural artifacts and practices. Digital humanities research may involve analyzing large datasets, creating digital archives, and using computational methods to study cultural phenomena.

Data Collection Methods

Data Collection Methods in Humanities Research are as follows:

• Interviews : This method involves conducting face-to-face, phone or virtual interviews with individuals who are knowledgeable about the research topic. Interviews may be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured, depending on the research questions and objectives. Interviews are often used in qualitative research to gain in-depth insights and perspectives.
• Surveys : This method involves distributing questionnaires or surveys to a sample of individuals or groups. Surveys may be conducted in person, through the mail, or online. Surveys are often used in quantitative research to collect data on attitudes, behaviors, and other characteristics of a population.
• Observations : This method involves observing and recording behavior or events in a natural or controlled setting. Observations may be structured or unstructured, and may involve the use of audio or video recording equipment. Observations are often used in qualitative research to collect data on social practices and behaviors.
• Archival Research: This method involves collecting data from historical documents, artifacts, and other cultural products. Archival research may involve accessing physical archives or online databases. Archival research is often used in historical and cultural studies to study the past.
• Case Studies : This method involves examining a single case or a small number of cases in depth. Case studies may involve collecting data through interviews, observations, and archival research. Case studies are often used in cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology to understand specific social or cultural phenomena.
• Focus Groups : This method involves bringing together a small group of individuals to discuss a particular topic or issue. Focus groups may be conducted in person or online, and are often used in qualitative research to gain insights into social and cultural practices and attitudes.
• Participatory Action Research : This method involves engaging with individuals or communities in the research process, with the goal of promoting social change or addressing a specific social problem. Participatory action research may involve conducting focus groups, interviews, or surveys, as well as involving participants in data analysis and interpretation.

Data Analysis Methods

Some common data analysis methods used in humanities research:

• Content Analysis : This method involves analyzing the content of texts or cultural artifacts to identify patterns, themes, and meanings. Content analysis is often used in literary studies, media studies, and cultural studies to analyze the meanings and representations conveyed in cultural products.
• Discourse Analysis: This method involves analyzing the use of language and discourse to understand social and cultural practices and identities. Discourse analysis may involve analyzing the structure, meaning, and power dynamics of language and discourse in different social contexts.
• Narrative Analysis: This method involves analyzing the structure, content, and meaning of narratives in different cultural contexts. Narrative analysis may involve analyzing the themes, symbols, and narrative devices used in literary texts or other cultural products.
• Ethnographic Analysis : This method involves analyzing ethnographic data collected through participant observation, interviews, and other qualitative methods. Ethnographic analysis may involve identifying patterns and themes in the data, as well as interpreting the meaning and significance of social and cultural practices.
• Statistical Analysis: This method involves using statistical methods to analyze quantitative data collected through surveys or other quantitative methods. Statistical analysis may involve using descriptive statistics to describe the characteristics of the data, or inferential statistics to test hypotheses and make inferences about a population.
• Network Analysis: This method involves analyzing the structure and dynamics of social networks to understand social and cultural practices and relationships. Network analysis may involve analyzing patterns of social interaction, communication, and influence.
• Visual Analysis : This method involves analyzing visual data, such as images, photographs, and art, to understand their cultural and social significance. Visual analysis may involve analyzing the formal and aesthetic qualities of visual products, as well as their historical and cultural context.

Examples of Humanities Research

Some Examples of Humanities Research are as follows:

• Literary research on diversity and representation: Scholars of literature are exploring the representation of different groups in literature and how those representations have changed over time. They are also studying how literature can promote empathy and understanding across different cultures and communities.
• Philosophical research on ethics and technology: Philosophers are examining the ethical implications of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology. They are asking questions about what it means to be human in a world where technology is becoming increasingly advanced.
• Anthropological research on cultural identity: Anthropologists are studying the ways in which culture shapes individual and collective identities. They are exploring how cultural practices and beliefs can shape social and political systems, as well as how individuals and communities resist or adapt to dominant cultural norms.
• Linguistic research on language and communication: Linguists are studying the ways in which language use and communication can impact social and political power dynamics. They are exploring how language can reinforce or challenge social hierarchies and how language use can reflect cultural values and norms.

How to Conduct Humanities Research

Conducting humanities research involves a number of steps, including:

• Define your research question or topic : Identify a question or topic that you want to explore in-depth. This can be a broad or narrow topic, depending on the scope of your research project.
• Conduct a literature review: Before beginning your research, read extensively on your topic. This will help you understand the existing scholarship and identify gaps in the literature that your research can address.
• Develop a research methodology: Determine the methods you will use to collect and analyze data, such as interviews, surveys, archival research, or textual analysis. Your methodology should be appropriate to your research question and topic.
• Collect data: Collect data using the methods you have chosen. This may involve conducting interviews, surveys, or archival research, or analyzing primary or secondary sources.
• Analyze data: Once you have collected data, analyze it using appropriate methods. This may involve coding, categorizing, or comparing data, or interpreting texts or other sources.
• Draw conclusions: Based on your analysis, draw conclusions about your research question or topic. These conclusions should be supported by your data and should contribute to existing scholarship.
• Communicate your findings : Communicate your findings through writing, presentations, or other forms of dissemination. Your work should be clearly written and accessible to a broad audience.

Applications of Humanities Research

Humanities research has many practical applications in various fields, including:

• Policy-making: Humanities research can inform policy-making by providing insights into social, cultural, and historical contexts. It can help policymakers understand the impact of policies on communities and identify potential unintended consequences.
• Education: Humanities research can inform curriculum development and pedagogy. It can provide insights into how to teach critical thinking, cross-cultural understanding, and communication skills.
• Cultural heritage preservation: Humanities research can help to preserve cultural heritage by documenting and analyzing cultural practices, traditions, and artifacts. It can also help to promote cultural tourism and support local economies.
• Business and industry: Humanities research can provide insights into consumer behavior, cultural preferences, and historical trends that can inform marketing, branding, and product design.
• Healthcare : Humanities research can contribute to the development of patient-centered healthcare by exploring the impact of social and cultural factors on health and illness. It can also help to promote cross-cultural understanding and empathy in healthcare settings.
• Social justice: Humanities research can contribute to social justice by providing insights into the experiences of marginalized communities, documenting historical injustices, and promoting cross-cultural understanding.

Purpose of Humanities Research

The purpose of humanities research is to deepen our understanding of human experience, culture, and history. Humanities research aims to explore the human condition and to provide insights into the diversity of human perspectives, values, and beliefs.

Humanities research can contribute to knowledge in various fields, including history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and more. It can help us to understand how societies and cultures have evolved over time, how they have been shaped by various factors, and how they continue to change.

Humanities research also aims to promote critical thinking and creativity. It encourages us to question assumptions, to challenge dominant narratives, and to seek out new perspectives. Humanities research can help us to develop empathy and understanding for different cultures and communities, and to appreciate the richness and complexity of human experience.

Overall, the purpose of humanities research is to contribute to a deeper understanding of ourselves, our communities, and our world. It helps us to grapple with fundamental questions about the human experience and to develop the skills and insights needed to address the challenges of the future.

When to use Humanities Research

Humanities research can be used in various contexts where a deeper understanding of human experience, culture, and history is required. Here are some examples of when humanities research may be appropriate:

• Exploring social and cultural phenomena: Humanities research can be used to explore social and cultural phenomena such as art, literature, religion, and politics. It can help to understand how these phenomena have evolved over time and how they relate to broader social, cultural, and historical contexts.
• Understanding historical events: Humanities research can be used to understand historical events such as wars, revolutions, and social movements. It can provide insights into the motivations, experiences, and perspectives of the people involved, and help to contextualize these events within broader historical trends.
• Promoting cultural understanding : Humanities research can be used to promote cross-cultural understanding and to challenge stereotypes and biases. It can provide insights into the diversity of human experiences, values, and beliefs, and help to build empathy and mutual respect across different cultures and communities.
• Informing policy-making: Humanities research can be used to inform policy-making by providing insights into social, cultural, and historical contexts. It can help policymakers understand the impact of policies on communities and identify potential unintended consequences.
• Promoting innovation and creativity : Humanities research can be used to promote innovation and creativity in various fields. It can help to generate new ideas, perspectives, and approaches to complex problems, and to challenge conventional thinking and assumptions.

Characteristics of Humanities Research

Some of the key characteristics of humanities research:

• Focus on human experience: Humanities research focuses on the study of human experience, culture, and history. It aims to understand the human condition, explore human values and beliefs, and analyze the ways in which societies and cultures have evolved over time.
• Interpretive approach: Humanities research takes an interpretive approach to data analysis. It seeks to understand the meaning behind texts, artifacts, and cultural practices, and to explore the multiple perspectives and contexts that shape human experience.
• Contextualization : Humanities research emphasizes the importance of contextualization. It seeks to understand how social, cultural, and historical factors shape human experience, and to place individual phenomena within broader cultural and historical contexts.
• Subjectivity : Humanities research recognizes the subjective nature of human experience. It acknowledges that human values, beliefs, and experiences are shaped by individual perspectives, and that these perspectives can vary across cultures, communities, and time periods.
• Narrative analysis : Humanities research often uses narrative analysis to explore the stories, myths, and cultural narratives that shape human experience. It seeks to understand how these narratives are constructed, how they evolve over time, and how they influence individual and collective identity.
• Multi-disciplinary: Humanities research is often interdisciplinary, drawing on a range of disciplines such as history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and more. It seeks to bring together different perspectives and approaches to understand complex human phenomena.

Advantages of Humanities Research

Some of the key advantages of humanities research:

• Promotes critical thinking: Humanities research encourages critical thinking by challenging assumptions and exploring different perspectives. It requires researchers to analyze and interpret complex texts, artifacts, and cultural practices, and to make connections between different phenomena.
• Enhances cultural understanding : Humanities research promotes cross-cultural understanding by exploring the diversity of human experiences, values, and beliefs. It helps to challenge stereotypes and biases and to build empathy and mutual respect across different cultures and communities.
• Builds historical awareness: Humanities research helps us to understand the historical context of current events and social issues. It provides insights into how societies and cultures have evolved over time and how they have been shaped by various factors, and helps us to contextualize current social, political, and cultural trends.
• Contributes to public discourse: Humanities research contributes to public discourse by providing insights into complex social, cultural, and historical phenomena. It helps to inform public policy and public debate by providing evidence-based analysis and insights into social issues and problems.
• Promotes creativity and innovation: Humanities research promotes creativity and innovation by challenging conventional thinking and assumptions. It encourages researchers to generate new ideas and perspectives and to explore alternative ways of understanding and addressing complex problems.
• Builds communication skills: Humanities research requires strong communication skills, including the ability to analyze and interpret complex texts, artifacts, and cultural practices, and to communicate findings and insights in a clear and compelling way.

Limitations of Humanities Research

Some of the key limitations of humanities research:

• Subjectivity: Humanities research relies heavily on interpretation and analysis, which are inherently subjective. Researchers bring their own perspectives, biases, and values to the analysis, which can affect the conclusions they draw.
• Lack of generalizability : Humanities research often focuses on specific texts, artifacts, or cultural practices, which can limit the generalizability of findings to other contexts. It is difficult to make broad generalizations based on limited samples, which can be a challenge when trying to draw broader conclusions.
• Limited quantitative data : Humanities research often relies on qualitative data, such as texts, images, and cultural practices, which can be difficult to quantify. This can make it difficult to conduct statistical analyses or to draw quantitative conclusions.
• Limited replicability: Humanities research often involves in-depth analysis of specific texts, artifacts, or cultural practices, which can make it difficult to replicate studies. This can make it challenging to test the validity of findings or to compare results across studies.
• Limited funding: Humanities research may not always receive the same level of funding as other types of research. This can make it challenging for researchers to conduct large-scale studies or to have access to the same resources as other researchers in different fields.
• Limited impact : Humanities research may not always have the same level of impact as research in other fields, particularly in terms of policy and practical applications. This can make it challenging for researchers to demonstrate the relevance and impact of their work.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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What’s the Value of Humanities Research?

What’s the Value of Humanities Research? Panel Presentations and Open Discussion

Monday, September 8, 2014 3:00 P.M. – 5:00 P.M. Banquet Room, University Club Building

W e in the humanities face widespread clamor for STEM fields, public demand for measurable and monetary value for research and majors, and rapidly changing landscapes of knowledge in the unfolding Digital Revolution and globalized Information Age. With the humanities “in crisis”—yet again—many are effectively defending the importance of the humanities for a college education.

But what about  research  in the humanities? Does it  matter ? How and why?

• What’s the  value of research  in the humanities in the 21st century? What’s its use or usefulness? How do we define  value in reference to our work?
• What’s the  matter  of humanities research? Is our task preservation or creation? Interpretation or discovery? Critical analysis or recovery? Innovations or replications? Instrumentalist solutions to problems or joyful expansions of knowledge?
• Should our research engage more substantially with the issues facing the world today? Is it sufficient to pursue knowledge as an end in itself?
• Do the “pure humanities” parallel “pure science” in as-yet-undetermined future value?
• Can we justify the humanities’ conventional focus on human meaning-making in a “posthuman” age of massive climate change, the declining diversity of species, the rise of robots, cyborgs, and chimeras?
• Can or should humanities research become more collaborative? What forms of collaboration beyond the model of lab science might work in the humanities? Is there still a role for individual research?
• Who do we do humanities research for? And to what purpose? A small circle of specialists? A wide range of fields? Our students? The “public”? Ourselves?
• What’s the value of humanities  research  for a liberal arts education? For students? For the “public”? For individuals? For familial, communal, and global relations?
• How do we affirm and communicate humanities research in the face of constant pressure to justify the value and usefulness of what we do?

Panel Presentations followed by open discussion. Come with your ideas!

Biographies of Panelists

Guillermina De Ferrari  is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature and the Director of the Center for Visual Cultures. Her research focuses on contemporary Caribbean narrative and art. Her first book  Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction  (2007) studies the metaphorical power of the vulnerable body in Caribbean narrative from the perspective of postcolonial theory. Her second book  Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba  (2014), which analyzes contemporary literature and art produced in Cuba since 1991, attributes the extraordinary survival of the Cuban Revolution to a social contract based on deeply ingrained notions of gender, community, and ethics. She is currently curating an exhibit called Apertura: Photography in Cuba Today  to be held at the Chazen Museum in spring 2015.

Sara Guyer  is Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities. She also teaches in the Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies, and has designed a new graduate certificate in public humanities that will launch this spring. Her research focuses on romanticism and its legacies, on biopolitics and critical theory, and more recently on institutional questions of the humanities. She is the author of  Romanticism after Auschwitz  (2007) and the forthcoming  Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism  (2015). She is currently at work on a collection of essays on “strategic anthropomorphism” and a special issue of  South Atlantic Quarterly  on biopolitics. She edits the new book series at Fordham,  Lit Z  and serves on the International Advisory Committee of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.

Caroline Levine  is Professor and Chair of the English Department. She specializes in Victorian literature, world literature, and literary and cultural theory. Particularly interested in relations between art and politics, she is the author of three books that address this question from different perspectives:  The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003);  Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts  (2007); and  Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network  (forthcoming, 2015). She is also the nineteenth-century editor of the  Norton Anthology of World Literature  and co-convener of the World Literatures Research Group and Sawyer Seminar (2015-17).

David Loewenstein  is the Helen C. White Professor of English and the Humanities; he is an affiliate of the UW Religious Studies Program. His research has focused on literature in relation to politics and religion in early modern England. Noted Milton scholar and author of many books, he has most recently published  Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture  (2013), a book that studies the culture of religious fear-mongering and the construction of heretics and heresies in early modern England from Thomas More to John Milton; much of the research for this book was done while he was a Senior Fellow at the IRH.

Daegan Miller  is a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow and a cultural and environmental historian of the 19th-century American landscape. His work focuses on how nineteenth-century Americans conceived of alternative, countermodern landscapes, ones that contest the legacy of Manifest Destiny, scientific racism, and the cultural hegemony of capitalism. Besides cultural and environmental history, he draws on eco-criticism, visual culture, cultural landscape studies, the history of science and technology, the various spatial turns in the humanities, and radical politics. He has published work in  Rethinking History , Environmental Humanities , the creative writing journal  Stone Canoe , and currently has pieces working their way through Raritan  and  The American Historical Review . He is completing a book manuscript, Witness Tree: Essays on Landscape and Dissent from the 19th-Century United States.

Lynn Nyhart  is Vilas-Bablitch-Kelch Distinguished Achievement Professor of the History of Science, with affiliations in the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, the Center for German and European Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies. Nyhart’s main research interests lie in the history of European and American biology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the relations between popular and professional science. With Scott Lidgard at the Field Museum (Chicago), she is currently working on a history of concepts of biological part-whole relations and individuality in the nineteenth century. She is the author of  Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany  (2009), and  Biology Takes Form: Animal Morphology and the German Universities, 1800-1900  (1996). She is immediate past president of the History of Science Society.

References for the Curious

Sources addressing the “crisis in the humanities” and what we should do about it abound. For the curious, the Institute is making available the following resources located in Room 201 (the Copy Room) for reading in the building.

• American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities and Social Sciences . Report Brief. Summary of Report submitted to Congress. June 2013.
• Peter Brooks, ed.  The Humanities and Public Life . Essays by Appiah, Butler, and many others. New York: Fordham UP, 2014.
• Helen Small.  The Value of the Humanities . Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.

Stanford Humanities Today

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Discovering Humanities Research at Stanford

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UCI Humanities Core

Research in the Humanities

By Matt Roberts Revised for 2018-19

Introduction

Welcome to the University of California, Irvine! As a student enrolled in the Humanities Core program, you will study a variety of cultural artifacts related to the theme of “Empire and Its Ruins.” Research will be important to your engagement with course material and topics, and the UCI Libraries is here to help you.

The UCI Libraries is home to several research librarians, who can provide you with expert service. To learn more, please visit the UCI Libraries’ Directory of Research Librarians .

To take advantage of the UCI Libraries’ resources for Humanities Core, please visit the Humanities Core Research Guide . You find the guide by visiting the UCI Libraries’ home page. Then click on the “ Research Guides ” Quick Link.

What is Humanities Research?

It is worth asking what it means to do research in the Humanities. As David Pan (Professor of German, UCI School of Humanities) writes, “[i]nterpretation is the primary method of the humanities because the meaning that humanities scholars search for is not a constant one. Rather, standards of meaning change when one moves in time and space from one cultural context to another. Negotiating this movement is the primary task in humanities inquiry” (6) .

As Pan emphasizes, humanities work is an interpretive process. For instance, for your first major writing assignment, you must perform a close reading of a passage from the Aeneid . You will describe how the selection’s formal elements—such as symbolism or diction—support an overarching theme in the epic as a whole. While this assignment does not require that you conduct research related to the  Aeneid , it nevertheless invites you to research the meaning of “symbolism” or “diction.” Let us therefore assess our information need and design a process to find the definition of, for example, diction.

Question: Where do we find the definition of a word or specialized term such as “diction”?

Answer: We find definitions in a dictionary.

Note that as the  Aeneid is an epic poem, it is important to determine what “diction” means within a literary context. Therefore, let’s consult a dictionary of literary terms.

Question : How do we find a dictionary of literary terms?

Answer: Consult the UCI Libraries’ webpage . Then search Library Search , the new finding aid for the UCI Libraries’ catalog. Since we don’t know the exact title of the dictionary that we might use, we can simply search for “dictionary of literary terms.”

We must choose the title that best matches our information need. I chose The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms because Oxford University Press publishes exemplary reference materials. The green “Available Online” link takes me directly to this resource. I can then use the resource to search for the definition of “Diction.”

So, what have we learned?

• Research begins with a question (“What is diction?”).
• The research question(s) that we ask helps us to discover information.
• The kind of information that we need to discover will often determine what UCI Libraries’ resource to consult (e.g., a book, reference resource, database, etc.).
• Discovering information helps us to interpret an object of study.
• The interpretation of the object of study enables us to craft clearly argued responses to writing assignments.

In other words, humanities research is a strategic exploration whereby information discovery facilitates your interpretive abilities.

Doing Research: Primary Sources and Secondary Sources

As we have already noticed, the research process involves the ability to discover a source that provides information of some kind. It is therefore important to distinguish between sources so that you can readily access that information.

Scholars typically distinguish between kinds of sources, particularly between primary and secondary sources. As you will be reading a variety of texts this year, it is important to recognize that texts are not objectively primary or secondary. Ultimately, the extent to which sources are primary depends upon the questions you ask about them and the way that you use them (Arndt 93). For instance, a primary source is an object that bears witness to a historical event. Primary sources therefore call us to consider how they make meaning of the event to which they bear witness. On the other hand, secondary sources interpret a primary source. For example, if you were to write a paper that interprets how diction in the  Aeneid characterizes human experience, you would be creating a secondary source.

Determining the difference between a primary source and a secondary source can be difficult. Let us explore each type of source in greater detail so that we can begin to understand what types of question we can ask of primary sources, and how we can engage with them in order to research secondary source material.

Primary Sources

On your syllabus, you will find a variety of texts, or sources, that you will read over the course of the year. In the fall quarter, these texts include, but are not limited to:

• Virgil’s Aeneid  (19 B.C.E.)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men” (1754/1755)
• J.M. Coetzee’s  Waiting for the Barbarians  (1980)

These are generally considered to be primary sources, but how can you be sure? To answer this question, consult the Primary Sources Research Guide , curated by the UCI Libraries’ History Librarian, Madelynn Dickerson.

According to this Research Guide, primary sources can include diaries, memoirs, letters, newspapers, speeches, interviews, government documents, photographs, works of art, video recordings, maps, manuscripts, data, and physical artifacts.

Question: Is the  Aeneid a primary source?

Answer: Yes. Most often it qualifies because it is a work of art, specifically an epic poem. However, one might use the Fagles’ version of The Aeneid as a secondary source, demonstrating how the translation is an interpretation of the original Latin text and using that analysis to offer one’s own interpretation of the epic poem. You can learn more about the interpretive politics of translation from Giovanna Fogli and Nuccia Malinverni’s chapter on “Translation” in your  Writer’s Handbook .

Throughout the year, you will be encouraged to find primary sources related to the topic of Empire and Its Ruins. To do this, it is useful to visit the Humanities Core Research Guide . Select the “ Primary Sources and Artifacts” tab to locate primary source discovery resources.

Additionally, you will have the unique opportunity to visit the Special Collections and Archives .

Follow the link to the SCA webpage, and you can discover a variety of primary source collections. Be sure to also visit the UCI Libraries’ Southeast Asian Archive webpage for a wealth of primary sources related to Empire and Its Ruins.

You can also use Library Finder to find primary sources and cultural artifacts in the SCA collection.

When analyzing a primary source, it is important to ask certain questions. Questions such as those listed below will help you to discover information, which you can use to interpret a primary source. In other words, questions such as these will help you to determine how a primary source makes meaning of the event to which they bear witness.

• Who made the primary source? What was that person’s race, gender, class? How, if at all, would that matter within the historical period in which the source is created? (Authorship)
• Where, when, and why was the primary source written/made? Does it describe specific attitudes of a historical period and place? What motivated its production? (Historical Context)
• For whom was the primary source written/made? For public or private use? Was it reproduced for a mass audience? How might that audience have used or responded to this source? (Audience)
• Of what is the primary source made? How might that shape how the source is understood and interpreted? (Materiality)
• What are the limitations of this type of source? What can’t it tell us? For whom is it not made available?

Simple questions such as these can help you to formulate more sophisticated research questions or topics of inquiry. You may therefore want to examine other primary sources or search for how expert scholars interpret the primary source that interests you.

Secondary Sources

When you do research, you are embarking on a journey that requires you to engage with how others interpret the primary source or sources that interest you. Whereas primary sources are original works that document an event as it took place, a secondary source interprets a primary source, often long after it was created. Secondary sources include, but are not limited to: Peer-reviewed academic books; chapters published in peer-reviewed academic books; peer-reviewed journal articles; newspaper and magazine articles published after, and therefore not explicitly covering, a historical event. Peer-reviewed works are considered to be most reliable in academic settings because they have been scrutinized and vetted by scholars to determine if the research presented makes a significant contribution.

Question : How do we find peer-reviewed journal articles?

Answer: Let’s return to the Humanities Core Research Guide, where we will find links to, and descriptions of, the databases related to Humanities Core. Select the “ Find Articles and Secondary Sources” tab to find peer-review journal articles.

I began my search with Academic Search Complete , which covers a wide-range of topics including social sciences, humanities, education, and science. It is therefore a good place to begin to do secondary source research. However, you can consult other databases such as the MLA International Bibliography , Project Muse , or JSTOR .

The above screen shot indicates how one might find scholarly articles related to the topic of the  Aeneid and Empire. I also checked the “Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals” box to limit my results. This search populates the following result list:

The article entitled “ Epic and Empire” appears directly related to our search. Selecting that article will open up the record for the article.

For this article, we can click on the “PDF Full Text” icon and download the article. For articles that do not have a link to the PDF, please click on the “UC E-Links” icon to search for alternative methods of access.

Please remember that secondary sources are interpretations. Consequently, as a researcher, situate yourself in an active role. In this way, you will understand that secondary sources should not speak for you or instead of you. Rather, you should integrate them into your analysis of a primary source to demonstrate your own contribution to a scholarly conversation on a topic that interests you. We do not do research simply to communicate how others have interpreted a primary source. We do research to discover how to interpret something for ourselves.

• Primary sources are original sources created at the time a historical event occurs and are directly associated with their creator. A primary source is the subjective interpretation of a witness to an event.
• Secondary sources are scholarly or popular sources that interpret a primary source and can be created long after the primary source was created.
• Research is a process that requires us to question and interrogate the information that we discover in order to interpret an object of study. It requires the evaluation and integration of both primary and secondary sources.
• The UCI Libraries have several research resources that can help you to discover and choose primary sources and secondary sources that interest you.
• Research Librarians at the UCI Libraries are here to help you!

Please note that you will be able to take advantage of several of the UCI Libraries’ instruction and reference services throughout the year. You can meet with research librarians who specialize in specific disciplines to learn more about conducting searches and vetting sources.

Works Cited

Arndt, Ava. “What to do with Primary Sources.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook: War, edited by Larisa Castillo, Pearson, 2014, pp. 90-94.

Baldick, Chris. “Diction.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms . 3 rd ed., 2008. doi:10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001. Accessed 12 September 2016.

Imamoto, Rebecca. Primary Sources for History: Primary Sources . University of California, Irvine. Sept. 2016. http://guides.lib.uci.edu/primary_sources. Accessed 12 September 2016.

Pan, David. “What are the Humanities?” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook: War , edited by Larisa Castillo, Pearson, 2014, pp. 5-9.

Quint, David. “Epic and Empire.” Comparative Literature , vol. 26, no. 1, 2001, pp. 620-26.1. Academic Search Complete . Web. 16 Sept. 2016. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=7073526&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Accessed 16 September 2016.

Roberts, Matthew. Humanities Core Course . University of California, Irvine. Sept. 2016. http://guides.lib.uci.edu/primary_sources. Accessed 12 September 2016.

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New research shows how studying the humanities can benefit young people’s future careers and wider society

Studying a humanities degree at university gives young people vital skills which benefit them throughout their careers and prepare them for changes and uncertainty in the labour market, according to new research by Oxford University. 

The report, called ‘The Value of the Humanities’, used an innovative methodology to understand how humanities graduates have fared over their whole careers – not just at a fixed point in time after graduation. 

In the largest study of its kind, the report followed the career destinations of over 9,000 Oxford humanities graduates aged between 21 and 54 who entered the job market between 2000 and 2019, cross-referenced with UK government data on graduate outcomes and salaries. This was combined with in-depth interviews with around 100 alumni and current students, and interviews with employers from many sectors.  

Further interviews with employers were carried out after the onset of COVID-19 and the impact it has had on the economy and the labour market to test how the report’s findings held up in a post-pandemic world. In fact, the report suggests that the pandemic has accelerated trends towards automation, digitalisation and flexible modes of working, and the resilience of humanities graduates makes them particularly well suited to navigate this changing environment. Recent developments in AI such as ChatGPT have only advanced predictions about imminent changes to the workplace brought by technology.

The report was commissioned by Oxford University’s Humanities Division and its lead author was Dr James Robson of the Oxford University’s Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE). It comes shortly after a report from the Higher Education Policy Institute which quantified the strength of the humanities in the UK.

Professor Dan Grimley, Head of Humanities at Oxford University, said: 'This report confirms what I and so many humanities graduates will already recognise: that the skills and experiences conferred by studying a humanities subject can transform their working life, their life as a whole, and the world around them.

'Students, graduates and employers noted that the resilience and adaptability developed during a humanities degree is particularly useful during big changes in the labour market – whether that’s triggered by a global financial crisis, changes caused by the rise of automation and AI technologies, or indeed a global pandemic. 

'I often hear young people saying that they would love to continue studying music or languages or history or classics at A-level and beyond, but they fear it would compromise their ability to get an impactful job. I hope this report will convince them – and their parents and teachers – that they can continue studying the humanities subject they love and at the same time develop skills which employers report they are valuing more and more.' 

Dame Emma Walmsley, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline who studied Classics and Modern Languages at Oxford, said: 'Being a humanities student at Oxford was foundational - to the curiosity, reserves of courage, and appetite for connectivity I have relied on deeply in life so far.'

The report’s key findings include: 

1) Humanities graduates develop resilience, flexibility and skills to adapt to challenging and changing labour markets.  

Employers interviewed for the report highlighted that disruption caused by COVID-19 and increased automation and digitisation will significantly change the nature of work in the next 5-10 years. The report said the “skills related to human interaction, communication and negotiation” learned while studying humanities will help them to meet future employer demands. This resilience helped graduates to cope and respond well to the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis. It seems set to have the same effect for graduates entering a post-COVID labour market characterised by increased digitalisation and remote working. 

2) Humanities careers open a path to success in a wide range of employment sectors.  

The business sector was the most common destination of humanities graduates (21%) over the period. 13% entered the legal profession and 13% went into the creative sector. There was a notable increase over time of graduates entering the ICT sector, particularly among women.  

3) The skills developed by studying a humanities degree, such as communication, creativity and working in a team, are “highly valued and sought out by employers”.  

Interviews with employers found they particularly valued the following traits in Humanities graduates: 

• Critical thinking 
• Strategic thinking  
• An ability to synthesise and present complex information 
• Empathy 
• Creative problem-solving 

This supports recent research by SKOPE and funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council which revealed how business leaders in the UK see “narrative” as an integral part of doing business in the 21 st century. They found that being able to devise, craft and deliver a successful narrative is a “pre-requisite” for senior executives and becoming increasingly necessary for employees at all levels. 

4) Humanities graduates benefit from subject-specific learning.  

As well as the more transferrable skills like communication, graduates interviewed in the report showed that they draw throughout their careers on the sense of self-formation and the deep understanding they gain through studying histories, languages, cultures and literature on a humanities course. 

5) Studying humanities helps graduates to make “wider contributions to society”.  

Many interviewees in the report said their degree has enabled them to make an essential contribution to addressing the major issues facing humanity, and informed their sense of public mission and commitment. This includes navigating “fake news” and social media manipulation; climate change; energy needs; and the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence. 

6) Humanities graduates have high levels of job satisfaction and many said their primary motivation for studying their subject was not financial.  

The report found that studying humanities subjects had a “transformative impact” on people’s identities and lives. Nonetheless, the average earnings of graduates assessed in the report were well above the national average, with History and Modern Languages graduates earning the most. 

Dr James Robson and his co-authors for the report concluded: 'These findings clearly show that Oxford Humanities graduates are successful at navigating the labour market and financially rewarded, but also see value as existing beyond measurable returns and linked with knowledge, personal development, individual agency, and public goods.  

'They highlight the need to take a more nuanced approach to analysing the value of degree subjects in order to take into account longer term career trajectories, individual agency within the labour market, the transformative power of knowledge, and broader public contributions of degrees within economic, social, and political discourses.'

The report makes recommendations to universities, employers and government to help young people make a transition into work: 

• Offer support for a smooth transition into the workplace 
• Provide internships, focused in particular on less advantaged students 
• Support skills development in digital and working in a team, and provide students with insights into the changing labour market. 

The full report can be found at: 

pdf Value of Humanities report.pdf 1.77 MB

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Hilbert College Global Online Blog

Why are the humanities important, written by: hilbert college   •  feb 9, 2023.

Why Are the Humanities Important? ¶

Do you love art, literature, poetry and philosophy? Do you crave deep discussions about societal issues, the media we create and consume, and how humans make meaning?

The humanities are the academic disciplines of human culture, art, language and history. Unlike the sciences, which apply scientific methods to answer questions about the natural world and behavior, the humanities have no single method or tools of inquiry.

Students in the humanities study texts of all kinds—from ancient books and artworks to tweets and TV shows. They study the works of great thinkers throughout history, including the Buddha, Homer, Aristotle, Dante, Descartes, Nietzsche, Austen, Thoreau, Darwin, Marx, Du Bois and King.

Humanities careers can be deeply rewarding. For students having trouble choosing between the disciplines that the humanities have to offer, a degree in liberal studies may be the perfect path. A liberal studies program prepares students for various exciting careers and teaches lifelong learning skills that can aid graduates in any career path they take.

Why We Need the Humanities ¶

The humanities play a central role in shaping daily life. People sometimes think that to understand our society they must study facts: budget allocations, environmental patterns, available resources and so on. However, facts alone don’t motivate people. We care about facts only when they mean something to us. No one cares how many blades of grass grow on the White House lawn, for example.

Facts gain meaning in a larger context of human values. The humanities are important because they offer students opportunities to discover, understand and evaluate society’s values at various points in history and across every culture.

The fields of study in the humanities include the following:

• Literature —the study of the written word, including fiction, poetry and drama
• History —the study of documented human activity
• Philosophy —(literally translated from Greek as “the love of wisdom”) the study of ideas; comprising many subfields, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics
• Visual arts —the study of artworks, such as painting, drawing, ceramics and sculpture
• Performing arts —the study of art created with the human body as the medium, such as theater, dance and music

Benefits of Studying the Humanities ¶

There are many reasons why the humanities are important, from personal development and intellectual curiosity to preparation for successful humanities careers—as well as careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and the social sciences.

1. Learn How to Think and Communicate Well ¶

A liberal arts degree prepares students to think critically. Because the study of the humanities involves analyzing and understanding diverse and sometimes dense texts—such as ancient Greek plays, 16th century Dutch paintings, American jazz music and contemporary LGBTQ+ poetry—students become skilled at noticing and appreciating details that students educated in other fields might miss.

Humanities courses often ask students to engage with complex texts, ideas and artistic expressions; this can help them develop the critical thinking skills they need to understand and appreciate art, language and culture.

Humanities courses also give students the tools they need to communicate complex ideas in writing and speaking to a wide range of academic and nonacademic audiences. Students learn how to organize their ideas in a clear, organized way and write compelling arguments that can persuade their audiences.

2. Ask the Big Questions ¶

Students who earn a liberal arts degree gain a deeper understanding of human culture and history. Their classes present opportunities to learn about humans who lived long ago yet faced similar questions to us today:

• How can I live a meaningful life?
• What does it mean to be a good person?
• What’s it like to be myself?
• How can we live well with others, especially those who are different from us?
• What’s really important or worth doing?

3. Gain a Deeper Appreciation for Art, Language and Culture ¶

Humanities courses often explore art, language and culture from different parts of the world and in different languages. Through the study of art, music, literature and other forms of expression, students are exposed to a wide range of perspectives. In this way, the humanities help students understand and appreciate the diversity of human expression and, in turn, can deepen their enjoyment of the richness and complexity of human culture.

Additionally, the study of the humanities encourages students to put themselves in other people’s shoes, to grapple with their different experiences. Through liberal arts studies, students in the humanities can develop empathy that makes them better friends, citizens and members of diverse communities.

4. Understand Historical Context ¶

Humanities courses place artistic and cultural expressions within their historical context. This can help students understand how and why certain works were created and how they reflect the values and concerns of the time when they were produced.

5. Explore What Interests You ¶

Ultimately, the humanities attract students who have an interest in ideas, art, language and culture. Studying the humanities has the benefit of enabling students with these interests to explore their passions.

The bottom line? Studying the humanities can have several benefits. Students in the humanities develop:

• Critical thinking skills, such as the ability to analyze dense texts and understand arguments
• A richer understanding of human culture and history
• Keen communication and writing skills
• Enhanced capacity for creative expression
• Deeper empathy for people from different cultures

6. Prepare for Diverse Careers ¶

Humanities graduates are able to pursue various career paths. A broad liberal arts education prepares students for careers in fields such as education, journalism, law and business. A humanities degree can prepare graduates for:

• Research and analysis , such as market research, policy analysis and political consulting
• Nonprofit work , social work and advocacy
• Arts and media industries , such as museum and gallery support and media production
• Law, lobbying or government relations
• Business and management , such as in marketing, advertising or public relations
• Library and information science , or information technology
• Education , including teachers, curriculum designers and school administrators
• Content creation , including writing, editing and publishing

Employers value the strong critical thinking, communication and problem-solving skills that humanities degree holders possess.

5 Humanities Careers ¶

Humanities graduates gain the skills and experience to thrive in many different fields. Consider these five humanities careers and related fields for graduates with a liberal studies degree.

1. Public Relations Specialist ¶

Public relations (PR) specialists are professionals who help individuals, organizations and companies communicate with public audiences. First and foremost, their job is to manage their organizations’ or clients’ reputation. PR specialists use various tactics, such as social media, events like fundraisers and other media relations activities to shape and maintain their clients’ public image.

PR specialists have many different roles and responsibilities as part of their daily activities:

• Creating and distributing press releases
• Monitoring and analyzing media coverage (such as tracking their clients’ names in the news)
• Organizing events
• Responding to media inquiries
• Evaluating the effectiveness of PR campaigns

How a Liberal Studies Degree Prepares Graduates for PR ¶

Liberal studies majors are required to participate in class discussions and presentations, which can help them develop strong speaking skills. PR specialists often give presentations and speak to the media, so strong speaking skills are a must.

PR specialists must also be experts in their audience. The empathy and critical thinking skills that graduates develop while they earn their degree enables them to craft tailored, effective messages to diverse audiences as PR specialists.

Public Relations Specialist Salary ¶

The median annual salary for PR specialists was $62,800 in May 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS expects the demand for PR specialists to grow by 8% between 2021 and 2031, faster than the average for all occupations.

The earning potential for PR specialists can vary. The size of the employer can affect the salary, as can the PR specialist’s level of experience and education and the specific duties and responsibilities of the job.

In general, PR specialists working for big companies in dense urban areas tend to earn more than those working for smaller businesses or in rural areas. Also, PR specialists working in science, health care and technology tend to earn more than those working in other industries.

BLS data is a national average, and the salary can also vary by location; for example, since the cost of living is higher in California and New York, the average salaries in those states tend to be higher compared with those in other states.

2. Human Resources Specialist ¶

Human resources (HR) specialists are professionals who are responsible for recruiting, interviewing and hiring employees for an organization. They also handle employee relations, benefits and training. They play a critical role in maintaining a positive and productive work environment for all employees.

How a Liberal Studies Degree Prepares Graduates for HR ¶

Liberal studies majors hone their communication skills through coursework that requires them to write essays, discussion posts, talks and research papers. These skills are critical for HR specialists, who must communicate effectively with company stakeholders, such as employees, managers and corporate leaders.

Additionally, because students who major in liberal studies get to understand the human experience, their classes can provide deeper insight into human behavior, motivation and communication. This understanding can be beneficial in handling employee relations, conflict resolution and other HR-related issues.

Human Resources Specialist Salary ¶

The median annual salary for HR in the U.S. was $122,510 in May 2021, according to the BLS. The demand for HR specialists is expected to grow by 8% between 2021 and 2031, per the BLS, faster than the average for all occupations.

3. Political Scientist ¶

A liberal studies degree not only helps prepare students for media and HR jobs—careers that may be more commonly associated with humanities—but also prepares graduates for successful careers as political scientists.

Political scientists are professionals who study the theory and practice of politics, government and political systems. They use various research methods, such as statistical analysis and historical analysis, to study political phenomena: elections, public opinions, the effects of policy changes. They also predict political trends.

How the Humanities Help With Political Science Jobs ¶

Political scientists need to have a deep understanding of political institutions. They have the skills to analyze complex policy initiatives, evaluate campaign strategies and understand political changes over time.

A liberal studies program provides a solid foundation of critical thinking skills that can sustain a career in political science. First, liberal studies degrees can teach students about the histories and theories of politics. Knowing the history and context of political ideas can be useful when understanding and evaluating current political trends.

Second, graduates with a liberal studies degree become accustomed to communicating with diverse audiences. This is a must to communicate with the public about complex policies and political processes.

Political Scientist Specialist Salary ¶

According to the BLS, the median annual wage for political scientists was $122,510 in May 2021. The BLS projects that employment prospects for political scientists will grow by 6% between 2021 and 2031, about as fast as the average for all occupations.

4. Community Service Manager ¶

Community service managers are professionals who are responsible for overseeing and coordinating programs and services that benefit the local community. They may work for a government agency, nonprofit organization or community-based organization in community health, mental health or community social services.

Community service management includes the following:

• Training and overseeing community service staff and volunteers
• Securing and allocating resources to provide services such as housing assistance, food programs, job training and other forms of social support
• Developing and implementing efficient and effective community policies
• Fundraising and applying for grants grant to secure funding for their programs

In these and many other ways, community service managers play an important role in addressing social issues and improving the quality of life for people in their community.

Community Service Management and Liberal Studies ¶

Liberal studies prepares graduates for careers in community service management by providing the tools for analyzing and evaluating complex issues. These include tools to work through common dilemmas that community service managers may face. Such challenges include the following:

• What’s the best way to allocate scarce community mental health resources, such as limited numbers of counselors and social workers to support people experiencing housing instability?
• What’s the best way to monitor and measure the success of a community service initiative, such as a Meals on Wheels program to support food security for older adults?
• What’s the best way to recruit and train volunteers for community service programs, such as afterschool programs?

Because the humanities teach students how to think critically, graduates with a degree in liberal studies have the skills to think through these complex problems.

Community Service Manager Salary ¶

According to the BLS, the median annual wage for social and community managers was $74,000 in May 2021. The BLS projects that employment prospects for social and community managers will grow by 12% from 2021 to 2031, much faster than the average for all occupations.

5. High School Teacher ¶

High school teachers educate future generations, and graduates with a liberal studies degree have the foundation of critical thinking and communication skills to succeed in this important role.

We need great high school teachers more than ever. The U.S. had a shortage of 300,000 teachers in 2022, according to NPR and the National Education Association The teacher shortage particularly affected rural school districts, where the need for special education teachers is especially high.

How the Humanities Prepare Graduates to Teach ¶

Having a solid understanding of the humanities is important for individuals who want to become a great high school teacher. First, a degree that focuses on the humanities provides graduates with a deep understanding of the subjects that they’ll teach. Liberal studies degrees often include coursework in literature, history, visual arts and other subjects taught in high school, all of which can give graduates a strong foundation in the material.

Second, liberal studies courses often require students to read, analyze and interpret texts, helping future teachers develop the skills they need to effectively teach reading, writing and critical thinking to high school students.

Third, liberal studies courses often include coursework in research methods, which can help graduates develop the skills necessary to design and implement engaging and effective lesson plans.

Finally, liberal studies degrees often include classes on ethics, philosophy and cultural studies, which can give graduates the ability to understand and appreciate different perspectives, cultures and life experiences. This can help future teachers create inclusive and respectful learning environments and help students develop a sense of empathy and understanding toward others.

Overall, a humanities degree can provide graduates with the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to be effective high school teachers and make a positive impact on the lives of their students.

High School Teacher Salary ¶

According to the BLS, the median annual wage for high school teachers was $61,820 in May 2021. The BLS projects that the number of high school teacher jobs will grow by 5% between 2021 and 2031.

Take the Next Step in Your Humanities Career ¶

A bachelor’s degree in liberal studies is a key step toward a successful humanities career. Whether as a political scientist, a high school teacher or a public relations specialist, a range of careers awaits you. Hilbert College Global’s online Bachelor of Science in Liberal Studies offers students the unique opportunity to explore courses across the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences and craft a degree experience around the topics they’re most interested in. Through the liberal studies degree, you’ll gain a strong foundation of knowledge while developing critical thinking and communication skills to promote lifelong learning. Find out how Hilbert College Global can put you on the path to a rewarding career.

Indeed, “13 Jobs for Humanities Majors”

NPR, The Teacher Shortage Is Testing America’s Schools

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, High School Teachers

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Human Resources Specialists

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Political Scientists

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Public Relations Specialists

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Social and Community Service Managers

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The importance of the humanities

By Amanda M. Perez 04-10-2019

The Center for the Humanities is highlighting the importance of the humanities at the University of Miami. Since its inception in 2009, the center has been committed to promoting and celebrating scholarly pursuits in the humanities and in interdisciplinary fields. In an effort to feature the stellar work of faculty and students pursuing various topics in the field, the center is collaborating with several student organizations and campus partners to offer an exhibition: “Inquiring Minds: Undergraduate Opportunities in Humanities Research.”

Daniela Baboun, a junior majoring in biology, classics and English, is one of six students participating in the event. She said she first became interested in humanities research during her second semester, after she enrolled in a “Greek and Roman Mythology” course taught by senior lecturer Han Tran. Seeking a way to get involved in research, Baboun immediately reached out to Tran, who suggested she assist her with her own research.

Baboun describes her decision to assist Tran as a turning point for her, and said that research in the humanities has helped her develop critical thinking skills, understand the viewpoints of others, and cultivate empathy.

As an aspiring physician, Baboun said she “values the research experience tremendously” and believes that by expanding her horizons, she has gained greater cultural competence, a critical component for the development of a good physician.

Alyssa Samberg is also expected to share her positive experience in humanities research. Samberg, a junior majoring in English, history and political science is working to make humanities research more accessible and applicable. She has teamed up with Brenna Munro, an associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of English who is researching and publishing trends in LGBTQ Nigerian literature. Together, their goal is to create a digital map that could be used as a resource to future Nigerian writers.

“I have learned to think creatively and how to solve abstract problems—such as determining how to represent online publications on a map in a meaningful way,” said Samberg.

Samberg hopes to continue doing hands-on research and writing as she pursues a degree in law.

To learn more about other humanities research projects and how students can get involved in research, register here . “Inquiring Minds: Undergraduate Opportunities in Humanities Research” begins at 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 11 at the Whitten University Center.

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Qualitative and quantitative research in the humanities and social sciences: how natural language processing (NLP) can help

• Published: 23 September 2021
• Volume 56 , pages 2751–2781, ( 2022 )

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• Roberto Franzosi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8367-5190 1 ,
• Wenqin Dong 2 &
• Yilin Dong 2  

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The paper describes computational tools that can be of great help to both qualitative and quantitative scholars in the humanities and social sciences who deal with words as data. The Java and Python tools described provide computer-automated ways of performing useful tasks: 1. check the filenames well-formedness; 2. find user-defined characters in English language stories (e.g., social actors, i.e., individuals, groups, organizations; animals) (“find the character”) via WordNet; 3. aggregate words into higher-level aggregates (e.g., “talk,” “say,” “write” are all verbs of “communication”) (“find the ancestor”) via WordNet; 4. evaluate human-created summaries of events taken from multiple sources where key actors found in the sources may have been left out in the summaries (“find the missing character”) via Stanford CoreNLP POS and NER annotators; 5. list the documents in an event cluster where names or locations present close similarities (“check the character’s name tag”) using Levenshtein word/edit distance and Stanford CoreNLP NER annotator; 6. list documents categorized into the wrong event cluster (“find the intruder”) via Stanford CoreNLP POS and NER annotators; 7. classify loose documents into most-likely event clusters (“find the character’s home”) via Stanford CoreNLP POS and NER annotators or date matcher; 8. find similarities between documents (“find the plagiarist”) using Lucene. These tools of automatic data checking can be applied to ongoing projects or completed projects to check data reliability. The NLP tools are designed with “a fourth grader” in mind, a user with no computer science background. Some five thousand newspaper articles from a project on racial violence (Georgia 1875–1935) are used to show how the tools work. But the tools have much wider applicability to a variety of problems of interest to both qualitative and quantitative scholars who deal with text as data.

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What’s in a text? Bridging the gap between quality and quantity in the digital era

Roberto Franzosi

Beyond lexical frequencies: using R for text analysis in the digital humanities

Taylor Arnold, Nicolas Ballier, … Lauren Tilton

Text Mining and Big Textual Data: Relevant Statistical Models

On PEA see Koopmans and Rucht ( 2002 ) and (Hutter 2014 ); on PEA and its more rigorous methodological counterpart rooted in a linguistic theory of narrative and rhetoric, Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA), see Franzosi ( 2010 ).

See, for instance, Franzosi’s PC-ACE (Program for Computer-Assisted Coding of Events) at www.pc-ace.com (Franzosi 2010 ).

For recent surveys, see Evans and Aceves ( 2016 ), Edelmann et al. ( 2020 ).

The GitHub site will automatically install not only all the NLP Suite scripts but also Python and Anaconda required to run the scripts. It also provides extensive help on how to download and install a handful of external software required by some of the algorithms (e.g., Stanford CoreNLP, WordNet). The goal is to make it as easy as possible for non-technical users to take advantage of the tools with minimal investment.

We rely on the Python package openpyxl and ad hoc functions.

The newspaper collections found in Chronicling America of the Library of Congress ( http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/ ), the Digital Library of Georgia ( http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/MediaTypes/Newspapers.html?Welcome ), The Atlanta Constitution, Proquest, Readex.

Multiple cross-references are also possible, whereby a document deals with several different events.

Contrary to some protest event projects based on a single newspaper source (e.g., The New York Times in the “Dynamics of Collective Action, 1960–1995” project that involved several social scientists, notably, Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, Susan Olzak, Sarah Soule, and led to dozens of influential publications; see for all McAdam and Su 2002 ), the Georgia lynching project is based on multiple newspaper sources for each event.

Franzosi reports 1,600 distinct entries for subjects and objects and 7,000 for verbs for one of his projects (Franzosi 2010 : 93); similar figures are reported by Ericsson and Simon ( 1996 : 265–266) and Tilly ( 1995 : 414–415).

The most up-to-date numbers of terms are given in https://wordnet.princeton.edu/documentation/wnstats7wn .

A common critique of WordNet is that WordNet is better suited to account for concrete concepts than for abstract concepts. It is much easier to create hyponyms/hypernym relationships between “conifer” as a type of “tree”, a “tree” as a type of “plant”, and a “plant” as a type of “organism”. Not so easy to classify emotions like “fear” or “happiness” into hyponyms/hypernym relationships.

https://projects.csail.mit.edu/jwi/

The WordNet databases comprises both single words or combinations of two or more words that typically come together with a specific meaning (collocations, e.g., coming out, shut down, thumbs up, stand in line, customs duty). Over 80% of terms in the WordNet database are collocations, at least at the time of Miller et al.’s Introduction to WordNet manual (1993, p. 2). For the English language (but WordNet is available for some 200 languages) the database contains a very large set of terms. The most up-to-date numbers of terms are given in https://wordnet.princeton.edu/documentation/wnstats7wn .

Data aggregation is often referred to as “data reduction” in the social sciences and as “linguistic categorization” in linguistics (on linguistic categorization, see Taylor 2004 ; on verbs classification, Levin 1993 ; see also Franzosi 2010 : 61).

On the way up through the hierarchy, the script relies on the WordNet concepts of hypernym – the generic term used to designate a whole class of specific instances (Y is a hypernym of X if X is a (kind of) Y) – and holonym – the name of the whole of which the meronym names is a part. Y is a holonym of X if X is a part of Y.

Collocations are sets of two or more words that are usually together for a complete meaning, e.g., “coming out,” “sunny side up”. Over 80% of terms in the WordNet database are collocations, at least at the time of Miller et al.’s Introduction to WordNet manual (1993, p. 2). For the English language (but WordNet is available for some 200 languages) the database contains a very large set of terms. The most up-to-date numbers of terms in each category are given in https://wordnet.princeton.edu/documentation/wnstats7wn

The 25 top noun synsets are: act, animal, artifact, attribute, body, cognition, communication, event, feeling, food, group, location, motive, object, person, phenomenon, plant, possession, process, quantity, relation, shape, state, substance, time.

The 15 top verb synsets are: body, change, cognition, communication, competition, consumption, contact, creation, emotion, motion, perception, possession, social, stative, weather.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to aggregate at levels lower than the top synsets. Wordnet is a linked graph where each node is a synset and synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. In other words, it is not a simple tree structure: there is no way to tell at which level the synset is located at. For example, the synset “anger” can be traced from top level synset “feeling” and follows the path: feeling—> emotion—> anger. But it can also be traced from top level synset “state” and follows the path: state—> condition—> physiological condition—> arousal—> emotional arousal—> anger. In the first case, “anger” is at level 3 (assuming “feeling” and or other top synsets are level 1). In the second case, “anger” is at level 6. Programmatically, if one gives users more freedom to control the level of aggregating up, it is hard to build a user-friendly communication protocol. If the user wants to aggregate up to level 3 (two levels below the top synset), then should “anger” be considered as a level 3 synset? Does the user want “anger” to be considered as a level 3 synset? Since there is no clear definition of how far away a synset is from the root (top synsets), our algorithm aggregates all the way up to root.

Suppose that you wish to aggregate the verbs in your corpus under the label “violence.” WordNet top synsets for verbs do not include “violence” as a class. Verbs of violence may be listed under body, contact, social. You could use the Zoom IN/DOWN widget of Figure 24 to get a list of verbs in these top synsets, then manually go through the list to select only the verbs of violence of interest. That would mean go through manually the list of 956 verbs in the body class (e.g., to find there the verb “attack,” among others), the 2515 verbs of contact (e.g., to find there the verb “wrestle”), and the 1688 verbs of social (e.g., to find there the verb “abuse”). In total, 5159 distinct verbs. A restricted domain, for example newspaper articles of lynching, may have many fewer distinct verbs, indeed 2027, extracted using the lemma of the POS annotator for all the VB* tags. Whether using the WordNet dictionary (a better solution if the list of verbs of violence has to be used across different corpora) or the POS distinct verb tags, the dictionary list can then be used to annotate the documents in the corpus via the NLP Suite dictionary annotator GUI.

Current computational technology makes available a different approach to creating summaries: an automatic approach where summaries are generated automatically by a computer algorithm, rather than a human (Gambhir and Gupta 2017 ; Lloret and Palomar 2012 ; Nenkova and McKeown 2012 ).

We use the word “compilation”, rather than “summary”, since, by and large, we maintained the original newspaper language (e.g., the word “negro”, rather than “African American”) and original story line, however contrived the story may have appeared to be.

https://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/ Manning et al. ( 2014 ).

More specifically, for locations, the NER tags used are: City, State_or_Province, Country. Several other NER values are also recognized and tagged (e.g., Numbers, Percentages, Money, Religion), but they are irrelevant in this context.

The column “List of Documents for Type of Error” may be split in several columns depending upon the number of documents found in error.

The algorithm can process all or selected NER values, comparing the associated word values either within a single event subdirectory or across all subdirectories (or all the files listed in a directory, for that matter).

We calculated the relativity index by using cosine similarity (Singhal 2001 ). We use the two list of NN, NNS, Location, Date, Person, and Organization from the j doc (L1) and from all other j-1 docs (L2) and compute cosine similarity between the two lists. We construct a vector from each list by mapping the word count onto each unique word. Then, relativity index is calculated as the cosine similarity between two vectors and n is the count of total unique words. For instance, L1 is {Alice: 2, doctor: 3, hospital: 1}, and L2 is {Bob:1, hospital: 2}. If we fix the order of all words as {Alice, doctor, hospital, Bob}, then the first vector (V1) is (2, 3, 1, 0), the second vector (V2) is (0, 0, 2, 1), and the length n of the vector is 4. The relativity is the dot product of two vectors divided by the product of two vector lengths. Documents with index of relativity significantly lower than the rest of the cluster are signalled as unlikely to belong to the cluster.

\({\text{relativity}}\;{\text{index}} = \frac{{\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {\left( {V1_{i} V2_{i} } \right)} }}{{\sqrt {\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {V1_{i}^{2} } } \sqrt {\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {V2_{i}^{2} } } }}\)

The relativity index ranges from 0 to 1, where 0 means two documents are totally different, and 1 means two documents have exactly the same list of NN, NNS, Location, Date, Person, and Organization.

The bar chart displays the distribution of most frequent threshold index values as intervals, with most records in the 0.25 ~ 0.29 interval.

It should be noted that the use of the words plagiarism and plagiarist in this context should be taken with a grain of salt. First, the data do not tell us anything about who copied whom, but only that the two different newspapers shared content, wholly or in part; furthermore, the shared content may well have come from an unacknowledged wire service (on the development and spread of news wire services in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, see Brooker-Gross 1981 ; on computational tools for plagiarism and authorship attribution, see, for instance, Stein et al. 2011 ).

http://lucene.apache.org/core/downloads.html . For a summary of approaches to document similarities, see Forsyth and Sharoff ( 2014 ).

Other approaches are also available. After all, determining document similarity has been a major research area due to its wide application in information retrieval, document clustering, machine translation, etc. Existing approaches to determine document similarity can be grouped into two categories: knowledge-based similarity and content-based similarity (Benedetti et al., 2019 ).

Knowledge-based similarity approaches extract information from other sources to supplement the corpus, so as to draw from more document features to analyze. For example, Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) (Gabrilovich and Markovitch 2007 ) represents documents in high dimensional vectors based on the features extracted from both original articles and Wikipedia articles. Then, similarity of documents is calculated using vector space comparison algorithm. Since our main focus in this work is to detect plagiarism among texts in the same corpus, knowledge-based similarity approaches are not very fruitful.

Content-based similarity approaches focus on using only textual information contained in documents. Popular proposed techniques in this fields are Vector Space Models (Turney and Pantel 2010 ), probabilistic models such as Okapi BM-25 (Robertson and Zaragoza 2009 ). These methods all transform documents into some form of representations, and then either do a vector space comparison or query search match on the constructed representations.

document_duplicates.txt.

Users can specify different spans of temporal aggregation (e.g., year, quarter/year, month/year).

In this specific application, documents are newspapers where document name refers to the name of the paper (e.g., The New York Times) and document instance refers to a specific newspaper article (e.g., The New York Times_12-11-1912_1, referring to a The New York Times of December 11, 1912 on page 1). But the document name could refer to an ethnographic interview with document instance referring to an interviewer’s ID (by name or number), an interview’s location, time, or interviewee (by name or ID number).

The numbers in each row of the table add up to approximately the total number of newspaper articles in the corpus. This number of not exact due to the way the Lucene function “find top similar documents” computes similar documents with discrepancies numbering in the teens.

On the specific topic of lynching, see, for instance, the quantitative work by Beck and Tolnay ( 1990 ) or Franzosi et al. ( 2012 ) and the more qualitative work by Brundage ( 1993 ).

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Screenshot of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the filename checker

Graphical User Interface (GUI) for WordNet options

Graphical User Interface (GUI) for Word Similarities

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Franzosi, R., Dong, W. & Dong, Y. Qualitative and quantitative research in the humanities and social sciences: how natural language processing (NLP) can help. Qual Quant 56 , 2751–2781 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-021-01235-2

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Many of the most daunting challenges facing humankind today—from the climate crisis and poverty to food insecurity and terrorism—can only be overcome through cooperation and collective action on a global scale. But what would it take to unite humanity in this way?

According to the results of a new study, the key could lie in two of the most potent drivers of social bonding known in group psychology—shared ancestry and shared transformative experiences—albeit shared not only on the level of the tribe, the nation, or the religious community, but with humanity at large.

First author Lukas Reinhardt (Leader of the Global Cohesion Lab at the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion [CSSC], University of Oxford) said, "Us-vs-them thinking is on the rise in many places all over the world, exacerbating conflicts and complicating finding solutions for pressing global problems. Our research, however, suggests that it is possible to foster a shared global identity which could facilitate cooperation on the global level. The practical implications of our findings for policymakers, NGOs, politicians, and activists are wide-ranging."

In two studies involving more than a thousand US participants in total, the researchers investigated whether shared biology and shared experiences with people across the world can foster bonding with humanity at large and motivate prosocial action on a global scale.

To explore whether appeals to our globally shared biology can affect bonding with humanity at large, the study participants watched a TED Talk delivered by journalist A. J. Jacobs explaining how all humans share a common ancestry, portraying us as one large human family.

Those who watched the video expressed significantly stronger psychological bonds with humanity at large compared with a control group whose attitudes were measured before rather than after they had watched the video. Furthermore, participants who watched the video felt stronger social bonds with individuals supporting an opposing political party, compared with the control group.

To investigate whether globally shared experiences can strengthen social bonds on a global scale, the study focused on the common experience of motherhood. The researchers recruited a sample of mothers and showed that mothers felt stronger bonds with other women from all over the world if they shared motherhood experiences with them.

In each case, the strength of social bonds was measured using a series of images of two overlapping circles—one representing the participant and the other one a group, e.g. humanity at large or the group of all the world's mothers. The images differed in the degree of overlap between the two circles. Participants had to choose the image that best represented their relationship with the group, with the images that had the greatest amount of overlap representing the strongest social bonds with the group.

In both studies, the reported psychological bonding on a global scale was strongly reflected in measures of prosocial action. To assess this, the researchers used a measure from behavioral economics , where participants had to indicate how they would split an amount of money between members of two different groups in hypothetical scenarios. This measure is used as a practical and cost-efficient tool in experiments to shed light on how strongly participants care about different groups and has been shown to predict real-stakes behavior very accurately.

Professor Harvey Whitehouse (Director of the CSSC, University of Oxford), who co-authored the study, said, "At the CSSC we have been studying for years these two pathways to strong forms of group cohesion—based on shared biology and shared experiences—but this is the first time we have shown that we can create powerful bonds uniting all of humanity. If we can do this in a simple experiment, we can develop far more powerful methods of motivating action on global problems in the future."

He added, "Remembering that we are all related and all experience many of the same challenges in life could be the key to addressing a wide range of global problems, from intergroup conflicts to extreme poverty and the climate crisis."

Journal information: Royal Society Open Science

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• Open access
• Published: 17 April 2024

Students with special educational needs in regular classrooms and their peer effects on learning achievement

• V. B. Salas García   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7568-3879 1 &
• José María Rentería   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6486-0032 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  521 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

• Development studies

This study explores the impact of inclusive education on the educational outcomes of students without Special Educational Needs (non-SEN) in Peru, utilizing official Ministry of Education data and implementing cross-sectional regression analyses. Inclusive education is a complex issue that, without appropriate adaptations and comprehensive understanding, can present substantial challenges to the educational community. While prior research from developed nations offers diverse perspectives on the effects of inclusive education on non-SEN students, limited evidence exists regarding its impact in developing countries. Our study addresses this gap by examining inclusive education in Peru and its influence on non-SEN students, thereby contributing to the existing literature. Our findings reveal that, on average, the presence of SEN students in regular classrooms does not significantly affect their non-SEN counterparts. However, we uncover heterogeneous results contingent on the specific type of SEN and students’ academic placement. These results emphasize the importance of targeted resources and parental involvement in facilitating successful inclusive education, particularly for specific SEN types. In summary, this study underscores the need for tailored strategies and additional resources to foster the success of inclusive education and calls for further research in this field to expand our understanding and enhance educational policy.

Introduction

Inclusive education has become a significant policy for improving access to and the quality of education for children with special educational needs (SEN), who often encounter physical and social barriers hindering their access to education and entry into the labor market, which in turn is detrimental to the economic and social progress of a country (Filmer, 2008 ; Mitra and Sambamoorthi, 2008 ). Thus, the United Nations has declared “inclusive and equitable quality education” as the fourth 2030 Sustainable Development Goal, which aims to reduce the disability gap in education. Likewise, there exist international declarations like the Salamanca Statement in 1994 (UNESCO, 1994 ) or the Declaration of the Decade of the Americas for the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities 2016–2026 (OAS, 2018 ) that incorporate the principle of inclusive education to guarantee education for all.

There are different education approaches Footnote 1 to ensure education for children with SEN, but the inclusive approach, unlike others, promotes equal participation of SEN students in regular schools by attending classes alongside same-aged non-SEN students (Dixon, 2005 ). Inclusive education goes beyond the placement of pupils; it refers to a unified system that receives all students regardless of their abilities or disabilities (Dixon, 2005 ). Under the inclusive approach, governments and schools should provide the means (i.e., physical and human resources) to reduce or eliminate physical, academic, and social hurdles faced by SEN students within regular schools (Dixon, 2005 ). Thus, inclusive education aims for social cohesion and a less discriminatory education approach that helps enhance the human capital acquisition of children with SEN (Kiuppis, 2014 ).

Despite the efforts for an inclusive education agenda worldwide, children with SEN remain behind in education indicators such as years of education, school attendance, or academic achievement (Filmer, 2008 ; Rangvid, 2022 ). This raises concerns about the impact that placement of children with SEN in regular schools may have on the educational achievement of children without SEN since these children are also involved in the inclusive education system (Rangvid, 2019 ; Ruijs and Peetsma, 2009 ). In Peru, for instance, some teachers in regular schools as well as some leaders of deaf organizations, do not support inclusive education as they think it is detrimental for both SEN and non-SEN students (Goico, 2019 ; Peruvian Ombudsman, 2019 ). Nevertheless, there is little empirical literature focused on the effects of inclusive education not only on SEN students but also on non-SEN students, especially in developing countries that shelter a high percentage of people with disabilities (Olusanya et al., 2022 ). This paper, therefore, aims to fill that gap by using information from a developing country, namely Peru. It investigates the impact of inclusive education, quantified through the presence of students with SEN in regular classrooms, on the academic performance of their non-SEN counterparts. Analyzing the peer effects of inclusive education is of utmost interest for policymakers aiming to increase the presence of SEN students in regular schools, as policy implications should consider the effects on all children.

The present work provides three main contributions to the existing literature regarding peer effects in the context of inclusive education. First, we provide new evidence using unusual and rich data from a middle-income country. To our knowledge, there is only one study focusing on a developing country. Indeed, Contreras et al. ( 2020 ) analyze the Chilean case and find that placement of children with SEN in regular classrooms negatively affects the standardized test scores in mathematics and reading of their non-SEN peers, but it is neutralized when schools receive additional resources and specialized professionals. Nevertheless, Contreras et al. ( 2020 ) use panel data for students attending primary schools in two periods, 2007 and 2011, without including types of SEN. In contrast, we study children attending primary and secondary schools using cross-section data between 2011 and 2019 and disaggregate our analysis by types of SEN Footnote 2 .

Our second contribution is to disaggregate our analysis by type of SEN. We are aware of two studies that use an overall indicator to reflect the presence of SEN students and disaggregate it by type of SEN. On one hand, Hanushek et al. ( 2002 ) examine two types of special educational needs: learning or emotional and speech; while, Ruijs ( 2017 ) examines four types: visual, hearing, physical or intellectual, and behavioral. In our case, besides evaluating the consequences of placing children with mobility, vision, hearing, and intellectual or learning disabilities in a regular classroom, we also evaluate the repercussions of placing children with autistic spectrum disorder in a regular classroom, which is a much less studied topic.

Finally, our third contribution is to explore the heterogeneous results of inclusive education on the non-SEN student population. Unlike previous studies, we explore the potential different impact of inclusive education between male and female non-SEN students. As most reproductive work has traditionally been done by women (cf. Razavi, 2012 ), it could be argued that female non-SEN students are more likely to take care of or help SEN students, which in turn may influence their educational achievement. Our heterogeneity analysis also takes into account school characteristics like classroom size as well as mother’s characteristics.

In our analysis, we take significant steps to mitigate potential biases stemming from endogenous classroom selection and the sorting of SEN students. We achieve this by focusing on schools with one class per grade level, which provides a more controlled setting for our study. Moreover, our dataset allows us to identify the class composition, which is vital for investigating educational peer effects. The classroom environment is particularly relevant, as classmates have a substantial impact on each other’s educational outcomes, given their shared classroom experience throughout the school day (Balestra et al., 2022 ; Burke and Sass, 2013 ; Lazear, 2001 ).

Our findings suggest that the inclusion of students with SEN in regular classrooms, on average, exerts a neutral influence on their non-SEN peers. A nuanced examination reveals varied results contingent upon the specific categories of SEN. This variability is consistent with the fact that SEN encompasses a broad spectrum of support requirements arising from diverse degrees and types of individual abilities, spanning physical, psychological, cognitive, and sensory domains. Hence, the influence of inclusive education would vary according to the distinct profile of the SEN student integrated into a conventional classroom setting. Furthermore, our results underscore the importance of accounting for temporal dynamics and the particular educational phase in gauging the impact of SEN students on their non-SEN counterparts. This observation aligns with the differential results discerned across academic grades.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The literature review and institutional setting are presented in the next section, followed by a description of the data and empirical strategy. After that, we discuss our results, and finally, we conclude.

This section starts with a brief literature review and then describes the main features of the Peruvian educational system as well as its public policy approach to inclusive education.

Literature review

The inclusion of students with SEN in regular schools remains a subject of debate due to the mixed findings within the empirical literature. Proponents of inclusive education argue that attending regular schools is not only a fundamental human right for children with SEN (Ainscow and César, 2006 ; Rangvid, 2022 ; Ruijs and Peetsma, 2009 ) but can also yield benefits for non-SEN students, particularly in terms of their learning development. This is attributed to the additional resources allocated to inclusive education (Keslair et al., 2012 ; Ruijs, 2017 ). Besides, inclusive education may help children without SEN to develop soft skills like kindness, tolerance, and patience, which are important to living in a diverse society (Contreras et al., 2020 ; Dixon, 2005 ). On the other hand, the main concerns regarding inclusive education are related to negative peer effects. The literature on class composition states that students’ performance is influenced by their peers’ characteristics (Ammermueller and Pischke, 2009 ; Burke and Sass, 2013 ; Lavy et al., 2012 ). Since children with SEN may require more teaching attention and show disruptive behaviors (Ahmed et al., 2021 ; Contreras et al., 2020 ; Rangvid, 2019 ; Ruijs, 2017 ), they could be considered “bad” students who could interfere with the educational development of their classmates without SEN (Lavy et al., 2012 ; Lazear, 2001 ), especially for those who are at the bottom of the ability distribution (Balestra et al., 2022 ; Lavy et al., 2012 ).

The quantitative studies that examine the peer effects of inclusive education mainly use data from developed countries. Most of them have found that inclusive education has a negative or null effect on non-SEN students’ outcomes. For instance, using data from Switzerland, Balestra et al. ( 2022 ) find that placing SEN students in regular classrooms harms not only educational outcomes but also labor market outcomes for non-SEN students. Similarly, studies from the United States (Fletcher, 2010 ) and Denmark (Kristoffersen et al., 2015 ; Rangvid, 2019 ) show that exposure to SEN students decreases reading test scores of non-SEN students. Also, for the United States, Gottfried ( 2014 ) and Gottfried et al. ( 2016 ) present evidence that inclusive education worsens the non-cognitive skills of non-SEN students. Fletcher ( 2010 ), however, points out that the negative effect of inclusive education in the United States disappears for reading when their lagged scores are considered in the analysis. Likewise, studies for Canada (Friesen et al., 2010 ), England (Keslair et al., 2012 ), and the Netherlands (Ruijs, 2017 ) also find that the presence of SEN students does not affect the academic performance of their non-SEN peers; but they point out that this result may be due to additional resources received by regular schools with SEN students. Conversely, other studies have found positive externalities of SEN students on the educational achievement of their non-SEN peers. For instance, Cole et al. ( 2004 ) point out that non-SEN students in the United States perform better at reading and mathematics tests since they may benefit from the additional resources allocated to inclusive education. Likewise, Hanushek et al. ( 2002 ) find that non-SEN students attending inclusive classrooms in the United States improve their mathematics test scores. Using data from the same country, Gottfried and McGene ( 2013 ) go beyond by showing that having a sibling with SEN helps to improve the schooling achievement of those siblings without SEN.

Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews have examined the effects of inclusive education on students with and without SEN. The coincidences lie in the varied impacts of inclusive education on non-SEN students, demonstrating a nuanced and context-dependent picture. While Dell’Anna et al. ( 2021 ) hint at positive peer attitudes in inclusive settings, the academic outcomes and the experience of non-SEN students diverge, with high achievers potentially benefiting more than low achievers (Ruijs and Peetsma, 2009 ). Kart and Kart ( 2021 ) and Szumski et al. ( 2017 ) contribute to the discussion, highlighting mixed academic effects across different grade levels. The meta-analyses by Oh-Young and Filler ( 2015 ) and Krämer et al. ( 2021 ) emphasize the overall positive impact of inclusive settings for students with SEN while still acknowledging variations in outcomes. Finally, Van Mieghem et al. ( 2020 ) emphasize the pivotal role of teacher professional development in the successful implementation of inclusive education.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the conflicting results found in the literature may be explained by the differences in the criteria used to identify a SEN student. Most of the previous studies have used an aggregated measure to encompass all SEN students without considering the types of SEN (e.g., Contreras et al., 2020 ; Rangvid, 2019 ). On the other hand, some studies have focused on one or two types of special needs; such as emotional disturbances and mental disabilities (e.g., Cole et al., 2004 ; Fletcher, 2010 ; Hanushek et al., 2002 ; Kristoffersen et al., 2015 ), or learning and behavioral disabilities (e.g., Cole et al., 2004 ; Friesen et al., 2010 ; Hanushek et al., 2002 ). The present paper addresses these limitations found in the literature by taking into account different types of SEN and also by exploring the potential heterogeneous results of inclusive education for non-SEN students.

Institutional setting: The educational system in Peru

Primary and secondary education in Peru is compulsory and provided by the government at no cost and by the private sector with a wide tuition range. Peruvian children between 6- and 11- years old attend primary school and start secondary school by the age of 12 for a period of 5 years. The last National Population Census in 2017 reports that roughly 5.4% and 7.0% of Peruvians who are primary-school and secondary-school-aged, respectively, have at least one disability. However, according to the School Census of the same year, <1% of children attending regular schools are categorized as SEN students, which suggests that inclusive education in Peru is not well developed. Despite this low enrollment rate, the percentage of SEN students grew from 0.26% in 2007 to 0.96% in 2019.

Since primary and secondary schools in Peru must comply with a mandatory national curriculum, the same courses are taken by children who attend the same grade level across different schools. Schools may have more than one class per grade level, which are called sections , which students are assigned when they start primary school, which makes it less likely that students are sorted in a non-random fashion. Besides, every section has a specific classroom where students are instructed in most of their courses; thus, students do not need to move among different classrooms throughout the school day. At the primary school, the teacher assigned to a section is usually responsible for the majority of the courses; whereas, at the secondary school, it is often the case that there is a different teacher for each course. Another characteristic of the Peruvian education system is that it allows parents to send their children to any school, public or private, even if that school is outside their district of residence.

According to the last National Population Census in 2017, Peru has achieved almost universal coverage of education, 94.9% of the population aged 12 or over have primary education, and 74.5% aged 17 or over have secondary education. These numbers, however, mask a disability gap. Among adults aged 17 or over, 14.1% of people with at least one disability report having no education, whereas only 3.9% of people with no disabilities report the same. There is also an educational disability gap of 11.9 percentage points (p.p.) among the female population, but it decreases to 7.1 p.p. among the male population. These figures suggest that having a disability poses a larger burden for females than for males.

In this context, the Peruvian National Education Law recognized in 2003 inclusive education as the main approach to providing education to students with SEN, which should be accompanied by supplementary one-to-one attention by specialists (Congreso de la República, 2003 ). Thus, the Peruvian legal framework advocates an inclusive approach to integrating children and youth with disabilities into society. Aligned with the national inclusive policy, the state, as per the 2012 General Law of Persons with Disabilities (Law 29973), ensures access to quality inclusive education that accommodates individual needs. This entails adjustments in infrastructure, furniture, materials, curriculum, and teaching processes, all aimed at facilitating quality learning and fostering the comprehensive development of each student. It is worth noting, however, that empirical evidence indicates that many regular schools lack the necessary infrastructure, materials, and human resources to accommodate students with disabilities (Cueto et al., 2018 ; Peruvian Ombudsman, 2011 ).

The basic education system comprises three modalities: regular basic education (EBR), alternative basic education (EBA), and special basic education (EBE). EBR represents conventional formal education. EBA caters to students who lack access to EBR, emphasizing vocational and entrepreneurial skills. EBE is designated for students with SEN related to disability, talent, or giftedness. EBA and EBR schools, when admitting students with SEN, are termed inclusive schools . EBE operates in both inclusive schools and standalone EBE schools. In inclusive schools that accept students with mild disabilities and giftedness, EBE provides support and guidance through programs like Support and Advisory Services for Special Educational Needs (SAANEE). This includes personalized services and support to students, parents, teachers, and school principals through weekly visits of specialized professionals (Congreso de la República, 2006 ). Nevertheless, the evidence shows that inclusive education in Peru is far from successfully being implemented, and it is combined with an “integration approach” (Peruvian Ombudsman, 2011 ). On the other hand, dedicated EBE schools directly serve severe and multi-disabled students with needs beyond the scope of EBR or EBA schools. EBR and EBA schools are mandated to reserve at least two slots per classroom during the enrollment period for the inclusion of students with mild or moderate disabilities. However, in practice, this requirement is not systematically fulfilled (Cueto et al., 2018 ).

Data and methodology

In this study, we use three datasets that are collected by the Peruvian Ministry of Education (MINEDU). First, we utilized the Student Census Evaluation (ECE) as our primary data source, which encompasses the scores achieved by students in the national standardized tests of reading and mathematics Footnote 3 . To create our dependent variable, “learning achievement”, we transformed these scores into z -scores, standardizing them by grade level and by subject to have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one for use in our econometric analysis. Furthermore, the ECE dataset includes additional demographic information such as gender and the primary language spoken by the students. The ECE started in 2007, with annual assessments of students in the 2nd grade of primary (2P). Subsequently, it was expanded in 2015 to encompass students in the 2nd grade of secondary (2S). In 2017, however, the ECE was not conducted. Our second dataset is the National School Census (CE) which contains information regarding school characteristics and grade composition. The CE has been yearly collected since 2004, and it covers public and private schools. We use it to measure inclusive education by identifying the presence of SEN students at the section level. These two datasets are merged at the school level through a school identifier; thus, each student is linked to section characteristics in the school he or she is attending. The last dataset is the Information System to Support the Management of the Education Institution (SG), which was implemented in 2003 but has been mandatory only since 2011. The SG contains information that is uploaded every year by teachers or school principals. This includes students’ age, mothers’ age and education, and number of siblings. The SG is merged with the other datasets by using a student identifier.

For our analysis, we focus on students attending 2P in the period dating from 2011 to 2016 (excluding 2014) Footnote 4 and students attending 2S from 2015 to 2019 (excluding 2017). Footnote 5 For both grades, 2P and 2S, we account for potential grade advancement and delay. Footnote 6 Therefore, in the case of 2P where students are usually 7 years old, we include children aged between 6 and 8 years, and for 2S where students are usually 13 years old, we include children aged between 12 and 14 years. The final number of observations for 2P comprises 55,637 students who took the reading test and 55,614 students who took the mathematics test. And, for 2S, we have 47,491 students who took the reading test and 47,484 students who took the mathematics test.

To evaluate the influence of inclusive education on non-SEN students’ learning achievement, we use the CE where the school principal reports the number of SEN students placed in each grade level every year and per type of SEN. Footnote 7 This report is based on medical certificates, psycho-pedagogical certificates, and parents’ affidavits. Thus, we can identify the presence of SEN students per section to measure inclusive education. Footnote 8 Besides, we disaggregate the presence of SEN students per type. Specifically, we distinguish, for each section, the presence of students with mobility, vision, hearing, and intellectual or learning disabilities, as well as those with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). In the case of intellectual or learning disabilities, the CE includes those students with Down syndrome, brain injury, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia. The other SEN types considered in the CE include students with speech impairment, deaf-blindness, and hospitalized. Although gifted students are identified as SEN students in the CE, we exclude them in our measure of SEN.

There are three main challenges to estimating peer effects, as stated by Manski ( 1993 ), that could hinder proper identification of the influence of SEN students on the learning achievement of their non-SEN peers. First, students in the same cohort could face similar environmental factors or have similar unobserved characteristics that may influence their academic outcomes rather than having classmates with SEN. To disentangle the environment from peer effects, we follow the literature by using a large number of observations and fixed effects (Balestra et al., 2022 ; Burke and Sass, 2013 ).

Second, there is a potential reflection problem as classmates may influence each other and determine their outcomes simultaneously. Since we focus on SEN characteristics related to physical disabilities, health issues, and injuries determined by specialists, it is less likely that the SEN status of students was determined by the learning achievement of their non-SEN peers.

The third problem is related to self-selection. In the Peruvian school system, parents may choose to send their children to any school regardless of their district of residence; thus, specific school characteristics may attract certain types of students. To address this problem, we restrict the analysis to schools with similar characteristics. We select schools located in urban areas providing mixed-sex education that operate on the main school campus only during the morning shift and with 10–30 students per section. In the case of primary education, we select full-grade schools. Footnote 9 Besides, to address a potential sorting problem that could make it difficult to identify whether the learning outcome is due to the presence of SEN students or one’s ability, we select schools with one section per grade level. In this way, we avoid the possibility for school administrators to group students into sections based on their characteristics or for parents to choose a section without SEN students. Finally, more than 90% of non-SEN students take the standardized national tests, which suggests that school principals do not select high-performance students to take these tests.

To test the validity of our identification strategy, we perform two balancing checks for 2P and 2S, presented in Tables 1 and 2 , respectively. To perform these balancing checks, we use only students who took both reading and mathematics standardized tests, rather than separating them by subject as we do for the econometric analyses. Panels A, B, and C show that the presence of at least one SEN student does not determine the gender, language, or age of non-SEN students, respectively. We observe that coefficients are statistically not significant, and their size is smaller in comparison to those from the main analysis, except for reading test scores in 2S. In addition, panel D shows that individual characteristics do not determine the presence of at least one SEN student in the classroom. These results provide evidence against the likelihood of selection into classrooms.

To examine the impact of inclusive education on standardized test performance of non-SEN students, we estimate the following linear model:

Equation ( 1 ) is estimated separately for each grade level (2P or 2S) and subject (reading or mathematics) using a linear regression. \({{{\rm {EDC}}}}_{{i{\rm {s}}t}}\) is the learning achievement of student \(i\) in section \({s}\) at year \(t\) , measured by the z -score of the standardized test. \({{{\rm {SEN}}}}_{{{\rm {s}}}t}\) is a dichotomous variable capturing the presence of at least one SEN student in section \({s}\) at year \(t\) ; thus, \({\alpha }_{1}\) is our parameter of interest. In other specifications below, \({{{\rm {SEN}}}}_{{{s}t}}\) will be differentiated by type of SEN. \({{{\rm {STD}}}}_{{i{s}t}}\) is a vector of student-level control variables that include age in years and indicators for gender (1 = women) and spoken language (1 = indigenous). The vector \({{{\rm {SEC}}}}_{{st}}\) controls for section-level variables without student \(i\) . It includes mean age, proportion of male students, proportion of indigenous speakers, and number of students. The vector \({{{\rm {SCH}}}}_{t}\) includes number of students at the school level. \({{{\rm {HH}}}}_{{it}}\) includes the following household characteristics: mother’s age, mother’s education, and the number of siblings. We also include school-fixed effects \(\left({\gamma }_{{s}}\right)\) Footnote 10 and year-fixed effects \(\left({\gamma }_{t}\right)\) . Finally, \({\varepsilon }_{{i{s}t}}\) is an unobserved error term, and we cluster standard errors at the section level as this is the common environment shared by students (Balestra et al., 2022 ).

To assess potential heterogeneous influences, we follow recent literature Footnote 11 and estimate Eq. ( 1 ) using split samples by the characteristic of interest (Feigenberg et al., 2023 ). In particular, we evaluate the gender of the student \(i\) . For section characteristics, we evaluate the number of students. Finally, we assess the varying estimates based on the mother’s age and the mother’s education. In the case of characteristics that are represented by continuous or categorical variables, we convert them into dichotomous variables. For the number of students, we split the sample between sections that have 20 or fewer students and sections with 21 or more students. In the case of the mother’s age, we use the mean age to split the sample above and below the mean. The mean age is 41.5 for those mothers with children who attend 2P and 44.8 for those with children who attend 2S. Finally, for mothers’ education, we split the sample between those with and without tertiary education.

The descriptive statistics for our final cross-section subpopulations are presented in Table 3 . All descriptive and econometric analyses were conducted using Stata 18. In this case, we combine observations that include students who took both reading and mathematics standardized tests, as the characteristics of the separated subpopulations are similar to each other. According to Table 3 , students with SEN generally have lower reading and mathematics scores compared to their peers without SEN across both primary and secondary grades. This trend is more pronounced in 2S compared to 2P. We also observe in Table 3 that the proportions of women and indigenous language speakers are relatively consistent across SEN and non-SEN cohorts. Approximately 48% of the students are female, and the average age is 6.9 in 2P and 12.9 in 2S. However, it is interesting to note that the mean proportion of indigenous language speakers is higher in 2S (~22%) compared to 2P (~12%), indicating a potential demographic shift as students progress through the education system. A similar trend for indigenous language speakers is observed at the section level. Moreover, figures in Table 3 show that the mean age in a section is ~7.2 in 2P and 13.3 in 2S, the sample is balanced between male and female students at the section level, and there are around 20 students per section. Regarding household characteristics, the average age of mothers is 41.5 for those with children in 2P and 44.8 for those with children in 2S, around 6 out of 10 students have mothers with primary or secondary education, and the majority of students have more than two siblings. Finally, students enrolled in primary education typically attend larger schools, characterized by a pupil population exceeding 120, in contrast to those in secondary education, where schools typically accommodate fewer than 100 students.

Empirical results

Regression results from Eq. ( 1 ) are shown in Table 4 . Footnote 12 For column (1), we use ECE and CE datasets, which do not include students’ age or household characteristics. For columns (2) through (6), we add the SG dataset to incorporate students’ age and household characteristics. Columns (1) through (4) include the proportion of repeaters and the presence of at least one specialized teacher when students were 3 years old, and they were not attending school; thus, the presence of an SEN student should not influence the proportion of repeaters or presence of a specialized teacher. Columns (5) and (6) do not include those variables, and the results remain similar to those obtained in the previous columns. In addition, as a robustness check, we try different subpopulations based on students’ age (columns (2) through (4)) and schools with variation in SEN students (column (6)). For all the specifications, our results consistently show that the presence of at least one SEN student as a measure of inclusive education does not have a significant influence on the learning achievement of students who attend 2P or 2S. Our findings align with similar results from other countries such as Canada (Friesen et al., 2010 ), England (Keslair et al., 2012 ), and the Netherlands (Ruijs, 2017 ), indicating that inclusive education does not have a significant impact on the academic achievement of non-SEN students.

Nevertheless, we notice in Table 4 that, after including students’ age and household characteristics, the negative relationship between inclusive education and learning achievement (column 1) turned into a positive relationship (columns 2 through 6). Even in the case of students who attend 2S, the magnitude of the positive relationship between inclusive education and mathematics scores increased when student’s age and household characteristics were included in the regression. This suggests that the attributes of a student’s household, along with individual traits correlated with them, such as motivation, self-discipline, and parental support, may exert a positive influence on their learning environment. This influence could potentially counterbalance any adverse effects of inclusive education. An alternative explanation lies in the interaction effects between inclusive education and these supplementary factors. For instance, older students or those from more privileged households could potentially derive greater benefits from inclusive education due to their increased adaptability to the classroom environment. We further explore these issues in the Heterogeneity analysis section.

The main results, however, may mask different outcomes by type of SEN. Table 5 shows the results from Eq. ( 1 ) using the presence of at least one student with a certain type of SEN as a measure of inclusive education. Results Footnote 13 in Table 5 are estimated by gradually adding control variables in each column. Columns (1) and (6) do not include any control variable. Columns (2) and (7) add student controls. Cohort controls are added in columns (3) and (8), and school controls are added in columns (5) and (9). Finally, family controls are added in columns (5) and (10). As we can see in Table 5 , adding variables does not substantially change the estimates. We also notice that the sign of the relationship between inclusive education and learning achievement varies by type of SEN, and only vision disability (panel A) and mobility disability (panel B) have a significant positive relationship with the standardized test scores of students who attend 2P and 2S, respectively. As we can observe in Table 5 , even when we use the Romano-Wolf multiple hypothesis correction, the significance of our findings remains similar across different specifications (cf. Clarke, 2021 , Clarke et al., 2020 ). These findings confirm our main results that inclusive education would not harm the learning performance of non-SEN students, regardless of the type of SEN presented by their peers.

Results in Table 5 show that the impact of attending an inclusive classroom with at least one SEN student with a vision disability increases the reading and mathematics scores of students who attend 2P by 0.135 (adjusted p -value < 0.05) (column 5) and by 0.154 (adjusted p -value < 0.05) (column 10) of a standard deviation, respectively. In the case of students who attend 2S, the impact of the presence of at least one student with mobility disability increases the performance on reading and mathematics tests by 0.099 (adjusted p -value < 0.01) (column 5) and by 0.100 (adjusted p -value < 0.05) (column 10) of a standard deviation, respectively. Similar to our results, Ruijs ( 2017 ) found that the presence of students with vision disabilities as well as physical and intellectual disabilities in the third level of pre-vocational secondary education in the Netherlands increases standardized test scores of non-SEN students. Moreover, previous studies pointed out that non-SEN students show more positive attitudes toward their peers with physical disabilities (de Boer et al., 2012 ), which may explain the positive influence of SEN students with vision and mobility disabilities that we have found on the learning achievement on non-SEN students.

Heterogeneity analysis

We further undertake several analyses to understand the differences in the impact of inclusive education. Footnote 14 Clogg’s z -test is implemented for testing the statistical significance of the difference between the coefficients estimated separately by splitting Eq. ( 1 ) (Clogg et al., 1995 ).

Estimates of inclusive education by gender of non-SEN students are presented in Table 6 . The results show that the influence of inclusive education on learning achievement is not statistically significant for men or women, and there is no statistical difference between them.

To explore the influence of inclusive education by usage of adequate resources, we analyze the influence of the total number of students at the section level. We find that inclusive education is associated with higher scores in reading and mathematics for non-SEN students who attend classrooms with 10–20 students and with lower scores for those who attend classrooms with 21–30 students, regardless the student attends 2P or 2S. This result may reflect that small groups foster a closer interaction between students and teacher which in turn may allow the teacher to develop better teaching strategies since they know each student better. The result of inclusive education by section size, however, is statistically different only for the reading score obtained by non-SEN students who attend 2S. This result underscores the complexity of inclusive education’s effects and the importance of context-specific considerations. Authorities should pay special attention to the number of students assigned to an inclusive classroom.

To analyze the household’s characteristics, we use the mother’s age and education. In the case of reading and mathematics in 2P, it seems that older mothers help to improve the scores of non-SEN students who attend an inclusive classroom; but there is not a clear pattern in the case of 2S. The differences in the test scores by mother’s age, however, are not statistically significant in any case, 2P or 2S. We have to take this result with caution as it is possible that other family characteristics rather than the mother’s age act as a moderator that could influence the effect of inclusive education on children’s outcomes in school (Leigh and Gong, 2010 ; López Turley, 2003 ).

We also present in Table 6 the estimates of inclusive education on test scores of non-SEN students by mother’s education. We observe that the difference in inclusive education’s influence on test scores in reading and mathematics is not statistically different regardless mother’s education. Although the difference is small and not significant, we observe that among non-SEN students in 2P and 2S with well-educated mothers (i.e., tertiary education), inclusive education is associated with lower scores in reading and mathematics. This finding may suggest that well-educated mothers may dedicate fewer hours to helping their children as they are more likely to work outside the home in comparison to less-educated mothers.

The current study focused on the learning achievement of non-SEN students in Peru who attend an inclusive classroom. We use three rich administrative datasets that allow us to measure inclusive education by the presence of at least one SEN student in the classroom, which is the appropriate setting as students spend their school day mostly within the classroom. Thus, we are able to capture the influence of inclusive education on the test scores of non-SEN students on national standardized tests in reading and mathematics.

Inclusive strategies in regular classrooms are undeniably crucial, but without appropriate adaptations and a comprehensive understanding by all involved, inclusive education can pose considerable challenges for the entire educational community, including non-SEN students (Edwards et al., 2019 ; Nilsen, 2020 ). While some studies for developed countries show that the learning achievement of non-SEN students is improved by attending inclusive classrooms and others point to negative effects, there is limited evidence regarding the impact of inclusive education for developing countries. From this perspective, our study contributes to the literature by examining the case of inclusive education in Peru and its consequences on non-SEN students. To the best of our knowledge, this topic has not been previously analyzed in the Peruvian context. Further, we explore the influence of inclusive education by type of SEN and undertake a heterogeneity analysis.

Overall, this study has found that the inclusion of SEN students in regular classrooms, on average, yields no substantial implications for their non-SEN counterparts. Our results have shown consistency among the different model specifications estimated using several subpopulations with different age ranges as well as an additional sub-population restricted to schools with variation in the presence of SEN students. Nevertheless, it is worth noticing that there is a negative relationship between inclusive education and learning achievement of non-SEN students that turns into a positive relationship when the mother’s characteristics are included in the analysis. This may present an opportunity for school authorities to involve parents in the learning process of their kids to enhance inclusive education programs, as the literature suggests that the way inclusive education is implemented may lead to positive results on the academic performance of non-SEN students (Szumski et al., 2017 ).

We also found that the implications of inclusive education are contingent upon the specific type of SEN. In particular, non-SEN students benefit from attending classrooms with at least one student with a vision disability in 2P and a mobility disability in 2S. This finding underscores differential effects between lower and later grades, a phenomenon previously noted in the literature (Kart and Kart, 2021 ). Also, this result should draw attention from policymakers interested in inclusive education as schools may be more suitable to assist this type of SEN students, whereas the potential lack of resources to support other types of SEN might detrimentally affect SEN and non-SEN students (Edwards et al., 2019 ). In addition, we find that the influence of inclusive education is heterogeneous. We find that the small size of the classroom (20 or fewer students) helps to improve learning achievement in reading for non-SEN students who attend an inclusive classroom in 2S. Similar to previous literature (e.g., Szumski et al., 2017 ), this finding points to the need for educational policymakers to increase the budget for inclusive education, targeting to hire more and adequate resources. Finally, the mother’s characteristics are not relevant to explain differences in the estimates of inclusive education on academic achievement of non-SEN students.

Despite the contributions made by this study, some potential limitations could be addressed by future research. First, due to a lack of data, we are not able to incorporate a measure that reflects the diverse intensity of a disability (Oh-Young and Filler, 2015 ) that could be associated with different costs (Nicoriciu and Elliot, 2023 ). Second, the datasets employed in this analysis are unavailable for certain years, precluding our use of data from ECE before 2011. Additionally, the variable indicating the language spoken in 2S was not present in the same dataset (CE) for the years 2018 and 2019. Finally, despite our efforts to mitigate concerns related to omitted variable bias, we concede the possibility of residual biases. Specifically, we omitted socioeconomic status from our analysis due to substantial rates of missing data.

Data availability

The datasets used in this study are available from the Peruvian Ministry of Education repository upon request.

In the literature, there are three main approaches: (i) segregation, (ii) integration, and (iii) inclusive (see e.g., Dixon, 2005 ; Kiuppis, 2014 ; Madhesh, 2023 ).

It is worth noting that results from countries like Peru are not directly comparable to those previously presented by Contreras et al. ( 2020 ). Indeed, academic performance in Peru is poorer relative to Chile, as reported by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and it does not receive monetary incentives to enroll children with SEN. Furthermore, Chile displays a particular institutional framework worldwide since state-subsidized private schools (voucher schools) have around 50% of total enrollment (CEM, 2019 ). Thus, insights from the Peruvian case are valuable for other comparable countries.

Although the ECE evaluates other subjects, only mathematics and reading were evaluated in every ECE. Students attending 2nd grade of primary were evaluated from 2007 to 2016 on mathematics and reading. In the case of students attending 2nd grade of secondary, they were evaluated on mathematics and reading from 2015 to 2019 (except 2017), social sciences in 2016 and 2018, and science and technology in 2018 and 2019.

Unfortunately, information for SG was not available before 2011, and the MINEDU did not provide information for 2014.

The ECE was not conducted in 2017.

Advancement and delay in 2P (2S) are determined based on the chronological age of the students as of March 31. If a student is one year younger than the standard age of 7 (13), it would be considered advancement. Conversely, if a student is one year older than the standard age, that is, age of 8 (14), it would be considered within a delay.

Since we only include schools with one section per grade, the number of SEN students reported by grade is used to account for the presence of SEN students at the section level.

A cohort refers to the students within the same section for each grade level and year.

Full-grade refers to primary schools where teachers do not teach more than one grade in the same classroom.

Since we work with schools that have only one section, school-fixed effects can also be understood as section-fixed effects.

Feigenberg et al. ( 2023 ) state that using a split-sample approach is equivalent to a fully interacted model but avoids losing statistical power. Likewise, they state that, unlike a model with only one interaction, the split-sample approach reduces bias due to omitted variables.

Results, including all control variables, are presented in the Supplementary Information. Tables S1 and S2 for reading and mathematics in 2P, respectively. Tables S3 and S4 for reading and mathematics in 2S, respectively.

Results, including all control variables, are presented in Supplementary Information Table S5 .

Results, including all control variables, are presented in Supplementary Information from Table S6 to Table S10 .

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Acknowledgements

This paper was supported by the Peruvian Economic and Social Research Consortium (grant No. A1-PB03, CIES 2022). The authors express their gratitude to the participants of the XXXIV Annual Research Seminar 2023 hosted by the Economic and Social Research Consortium (CIES), as well as to two anonymous referees for their invaluable feedback, which contributed to the improvement of this manuscript. Special thanks to Juan Castañeda and Jonatan Amaya for their outstanding research assistance in earlier versions of this study. All remaining errors are our own.

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Salas García, V.B., Rentería, J.M. Students with special educational needs in regular classrooms and their peer effects on learning achievement. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 521 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03002-8

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03002-8

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