Regardless of their common commitment to inclusion and equity, the European education systems continue to reproduce social inequalities and variable graduation rates from upper secondary education (OECD, 2022). Educational researchers and politicians alike are often concerned with students learning, while simultaneously overlooking the structural hindrances that contributes to the reproduction of social inequalities. To develop a more inclusive and equitable education, we argue that educational researchers should pay closer attention to the learning barriers that exist within different education systems.

Despite its importance, learning barriers are often conceptualised in very different ways. Hence, in this paper we present a systematic review of how the concept of ‘learning barriers’ is understood and applied in recent educational research. Influential educational researchers, such as Illeris (2006; 2015; 2018), have often described learning barriers in psycho-medical terms, emphasizing individual characteristics. For instance, Illeris’ (2015, p. 30) three categories of learning barriers; mislearning, learning defence, and learning resistance, are all associated with barriers found within the learner. Nonetheless, other researchers, such as Nes (2014, p. 866) argue that “explanations of failure to learn may exist outside as well as inside the child, thereby moving beyond the psycho-medical towards a sociopolitical or relational paradigm”. Hence, we investigate the following research question: How is the concept ‘learning barriers’ understood and applied in international educational research?

In this paper, we propose three perspectives on ‘learning barriers’, drawing on research in the field of special needs education: 1) Understandings emphasizing individual factors within the learner, 2) Understandings emphasizing structural factors outside the learner, 3) Understandings emphasizing an interaction between the two factors.

The first perspective on learning barriers, emphasizing individual factors, is aligned with a psycho-medical understanding of special educational needs, considering learning difficulties as an individual disposition and aiming to reduce or remove hindrances for learning for the individual child (e.g., Skidmore, 1996). Interventions, or educational efforts, will be targeted towards compensating for these by minimizing individual predispositions, such as providing hearing aids for children with hearing impairments or audiobooks for children with dyslexia.

The second perspective on learning barriers, emphasizing structural factors, is similar to what Skidmore (1996) has referred to as the organisational paradigm, where special educational needs is a result of society’s organisational solutions. For instance, special educational needs can occur as a result of how teaching at school is organised, such as teaching methods. In our conceptualisation of this perspective, we also draw on Bourdieu’s (1991) description of how social structures contribute to the reproduction of social inequalities. We include this perspective in order to capture studies that conceptualise learning barriers as the result of social structures.

The third perspective on learning barriers, emphasizing an interaction between the two factors described above, is associated with a relational understandingof special educational needs, focusing on the surroundings of the child as well as the individual predispositions of the child. From this perspective, interventions will aim to reduce hindrances for learning in the child’s surroundings (e.g., Skidmore, 1996; Persson, 1998; Hausstätter, 2011). Thus, relational explanations will investigate social processes which create or sustain hindrances for learning, and an intervention will target context and surroundings in preference to individual ones.

To promote a more inclusive and equitable education system, it is necessary to have a common understanding of the existing obstacles within our education systems. A systematic review of how learning barriers are understood and applied in educational research, can contribute to a more complex understanding of the obstacles for inclusive education.

In this paper, we present the findings from a systematic review of educational research concerning the concept of ‘learning barriers’. The analysis was conducted as a scientific concept analysis (e.g., Berenskoetter, 2017). According to Booth, Sutton, and Papaioannou (2016) a concept analyses “seek to define, expand and extend the theoretical underpinnings of a target concept” (p. 17), and, moreover,“to sharpen [the researcher’s] tools by refining and revising concepts” (Berenskoetter, 2017, p. 164). Due to the discrepancies in how ‘learning barriers’ have been previously theorized, we argue that a refining and revising of the concept is required. The concept analysis was conducted through a systematic search in three scholarly databases (Eric, Google Scholar, and Web of Science). The keywords we searched for were ‘learning barrier’ and ‘barriers of learning’ in Danish, English, Norwegian, and Swedish respectively. In the initial phase, we considered all peer-reviewed journal articles published between 1990 and 2020 that used the concept and that was concerned with education. Due to the considerable number of relevant articles in English, we limited ourselves to articles where ‘learning barrier’ or ‘barriers of learning’ appeared in the title. The systematic search revealed that the concept is much used in research on organizational learning, nursing, teacher education, and in Ph.D. and master theses in education. Furthermore, much educational research is published in books. Notwithstanding, such publications were excluded. After an initial screening, we ended up with 129 relevant articles (1 in Danish, 127 in English, 0 in Norwegian, and 1 in Swedish). Following the initial screening, we assessed the collected evidence through a content analysis (e.g. Booth, Sutton & Papaioannou, 2016, p. 145ff). After reading through abstracts, searching for ‘learning barriers’/‘barriers to learning’ in the texts and assessing their application of the concepts, we ended up with 46 articles (1 in Danish, 44 in English, 0 in Norwegian, and 1 in Swedish). In this process, we excluded all articles related to barriers of implementation of particular teaching methods, educational initiatives or innovations. Based on the contradictions in understandings of the concept ‘learning barriers’ in the literature, we conducted a theory-informed categorization of the selected articles into three preliminary categories: 1) Understandings emphasizing individual factors within the learner, 2) Understandings emphasizing structural factors outside the learner, 3) Understandings emphasizing an interaction between the two factors. In the next section, we describe the results further.

As presented in the introduction, there exist divergent understandings of the concept learning barriers, where some researchers refer to characteristics located within the learner, while others emphasise structural or relational barriers. Among the selected articles, 3 articles were allocated to the first category, emphasizing individual factors within the learner (6% of the selected articles). Moreover, 34 articles were allocated to the second category, emphasizing structural factors outside the learner (74%). Finally, 9 articles were allocated to the second category, emphasizing an interaction between the two factors (20%). Contrary to our expectations, these findings suggest that to a majority of researchers, the concept ‘learning barrier’ has a different meaning than ‘learning difficulties’. As opposed to ‘learning difficulties’, which has been clearly associated with individual attributes located within the learner (see for instance Göransson & Nilholm, 2014; Hausstätter & Vik, 2021), our findings show that ‘learning barriers’ is most frequently applied to refer to structural factors located outside the learner, alternatively to describe an interaction between individual and structural factors. Examples of structural learning barriers described in the selected articles included culture (lack of cultural awareness, knowledge, and values), class (lack of parental aspirations and engagement in school life, poverty, etc.), language of instruction, violence in schools, as well as physical classroom facilities. We would argue that a greater emphasis on structural learning barriers can, indeed, challenge one-sided individual-oriented perspectives on learning difficulties in education. Nevertheless, we believe both perspectives are useful when analysing obstacles to learning within different education systems. As part of this analysis, a refined understanding of and clearer distinction between learning difficulties located within the learner and learning barriers located outside the learner can be a fruitful distinction.

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