Teaching Strategies for Students that are Mental Retarded - Essay Example

The mutilation of students who are mentally disturbed in reading skills of comprehension display differences in accordance with their disability level. Many people do not see the possibility for such students (mentally retarded) to learn writing and reading skills. The problems of these students are evident in the dimension of reading comprehension. Appropriate methods of teaching have become suggested to help students conquer these difficulties. The major areas in which mentally retarded students experience difficulties are finding the textual components in their reading and associating these components.

The reasons for these difficulties as suggested include lack of repeating strategies, memory problems, short attention span and problem in transferring the leant work (Iskdogan & Kargin 3). Strategies One of the reading comprehension technique taught is story map. It is the representation of some section of or the entire story and how fundamental components of the story are linked to each other in the form of graphics (graphical form). It is also a technique of constructing a schema, which involves teaching the relationships of sections of a story with each other to the person who reads, and providing the necessary components of the story in a schema so as to draw the attention of the individual who reads.

The purpose of this method is help students build the story about the fundamentals of the story in their minds with no use of the visual material given as a story map after a certain time. The technique is also meant to improve thinking structures, which provide text comprehension. This method (story map) is effective in separating the information which is significant and insignificant in the story, providing active participation, activating foreknowledge, predicting, directing students, and transferring data into long term memory (Iskdogan & Kargin 4).

The didactic approach is another strategy of teaching. This is based on games and exercises. Modern communities of researching and teaching agree that learning is effective, despite the philosophy or educational model used, when students get involved in games and exercises. In accordance with the socio-cultural theory, learning is majorly a social process. The most effective practices of education should be constructed upon all the ways in which people are specifically gifted at getting information kinds and causal patterns.

Games and exercises are all about interactions with other persons. The interactions of the mentally disturbed students with each other will help them understand and improve their relations with others, and also learn from them. Children acquire most of their knowledge through others, and that knowledge occurs outside school settings such as museums, toys, televisions and other artifacts, or even different games activities like playing soccer, doing athletics, and playing chess (Reis et al 3).

Traditionally, the main learning form has been the known teacher directed learning or guided learning. This is where the teacher or trainer makes all the appropriate decisions and the student follows him or her. In such a model of learning, the teacher decides about the learning goals, the strategies of learning, ways of measuring outcomes, and deals with judgment, results and feedback. The other two types of learning experiences are experiential and action learning. Serious awareness have become made on the benefits of new