The Design of a Successful Method of Teaching Students - Essay Example

Proven research based teaching methods to meet the needs with Learning Disabilities in the middle grades Chapter I – ment of the problem Special education for students with learning disabilities has had a relatively short, but always controversial, history. Before the 1960s, few public schools concerned themselves with students who, despite normal intellectual abilities and opportunities to learn, had significant problems with school achievement and manifested other behavioral symptoms (e.g., hyperactivity, distractibility, perceptual problems) that have come to be associated with learning disabilities. When programs for these students were started in public schools (e.g., the demonstration project in Syracuse, New York, directed by William Cruickshank and his colleagues, 1961), they reflected the traditional service-delivery model of the times - the self-contained special education classroom. Until the passage in 1975 of P.L. 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA), few states recognized learning disabilities as a handicapping condition that required the provision of special education services (Baker et al., 1995). But EHA changed all that. With a mandate to serve and with federal guidelines for diagnosis, publicly funded special education programs for students with learning disabilities became commonplace; the number of students classified as learning disabled (LD) and provided with special education services in public schools rose from 797,212 in 1976-77 to 2,214,326 in 1991-92 U.S. (Department of Education, Tenth Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988) On the other hand, in an ideal world, teaching and development would be inextricably linked. As teachers observed childrens intellectual, social, and academic growth, they also would seek to foster such progress. Routine observations with respect to childrens abilities would be complemented with consideration of how instruction or the classroom environment supports learning. This activity, the close observation of learning in response to instruction, is an exercise in problem solving and constitutes an essential element of diagnostic assessment. Whether in the classroom or the clinic, the interest is not simply to categorize a child under a particular label or diagnostic scheme but also to uncover the kind of instruction and educational setting that will lead to continued development. More specifically, the teacher must construct (a) an understanding of the childs current abilities, (b) a description of the kind of instruction the child should receive to make progress, and (c) a recommendation regarding the extent and intensity of intervention that is necessary (Carney et al., 1997, 175) However, lack of satisfactory academic performance by students with disabilities, combined with growing demands for social equity and civil rights, increasing identification of students requiring services, and ballooning costs of special education, prompted a radical reconsideration of the special education delivery system of the mid-1980s (Kavale & Forness, 2000; Will, 1986). Since that time, increasing numbers of students with disabilities have been educated within the context of general education (McLeskey, Henry, & Axelrod, 1999; USDE, 2000) Another problem related with the past is that students with moderate or severe disabilities were often exempted from the large-scale assessments that were a key component of school reform. In the mid-1990s, the National Center for Education Outcomes (NCEO) drew attention to this practice and noted that students not included in accountability systems could easily be bypassed in efforts to measure educational progress (Erickson, Thurlow, & Thor, 1995). Since the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Amendments of 1997, inclusion of all students with disabilities in accountability systems has been mandatory. Students who are unable to participate in large-scale assessments with accommodations must be given an alternate assessment. One of the major problems regarding the design of a successful method of teaching students with learning disabilities is the accurate definition of the term. LD identification is most commonly based on the administration of an ability measure and subtracting from that obtained score the students score on an achievement test; This approach is predicated on the idea that the learning disability is "within the student" or what it is usually called an Intra-Individual Achievement Discrepancy (IAD). Others have criticized the IAD and suggested that the defining feature of LD is severe low achievement alone or what will be referred to herein as an Absolute Achievement Discrepancy (AAD). A third approach has criticized both the IAD and AAD discrepancy types as inadequate and suggested LD identification is based on a severe achievement discrepancy from a local achievement standard (Deno, 1989; Shinn, 2002). This model will be referred to as a Relative Achievement Discrepancy (RAD) (Peterson et al., 2002, 459) Educational research has expanded in recent years with the study of various special populations, and new theories of intelligence (Gardner, 1983; Sternberg, 1981) revealed that the potentiality of some students may not be measured accurately by current measurement instruments. High ability students with learning difficulties have been studied for many years. Hokanson and Jospe (1976) found that among all disabling conditions, the largest population of high-ability students were identified as having learning disabilities. Maker (1977) examined the strengths and weaknesses of gifted students with disabling conditions and provided initial suggestions for programs and services for gifted students with disabling conditions. Maker (1977) expressed concerns about the difficulty of identifying this population, specifically the inflexibility of reliance on IQ score cut offs. By definition, children with learning disabilities (LD) experience difficulties in specific areas of academic functioning; In addition to their academic difficulties, many children with LD exhibit behavior problems or social skill deficits; In this context, given their academic, behavioral, and social deficits, it is understandable why many children with LD would perceive themselves less favorably in these three domains of self-concept (Bear, 2002, 405). Students with disabilities need to access these rigorous curricula so that they can participate fully in learning, work, and life in our society. Yet teaching for understanding in classrooms that include students with disabilities creates a double challenge for teachers. One is that teaching for understanding is in itself demanding. Many teachers grew up on rote learning of facts from textbooks. As a result, they too often engage students in reproducing information rather than in generating solutions from their interactions with ideas, materials, and each other. A second challenge is that students with disabilities bring a wide range of learning difficulties to learning opportunities focused on understanding goals. Indeed, recent results for students with disabilities who are included in the general education classroom are mixed, although the classrooms studied were not necessarily engaged in instruction centered on understanding goals (Morocco, 2001, 7) Chapter II – Literature Review Middle-school students ability to understand a variety of texts and express their understanding in writing is core to learning in every major content area and critical to their progress into high school. In language arts, specifically, state and national frameworks emphasize substantive understanding goals such as understanding the purposes and features of different kinds of texts (narrative, informative, persuasive) and understanding the meaning of literary concepts such as imagery, metaphor, and point of view. State frameworks also include understanding goals related to the ways of knowing that are important to reading literary texts. Students are expected to understand how to make inferences about a character from descriptions of what that character is doing or thinking. Students are also expected to understand how to apply a theme to a literary text. In writing, students are expected to understand how to describe their own responses to a text and how to use reasons and evidence to argue for an interpretation of text (Marzano & Kendall, 1995) (in Chiarelli et al. 2001, 47) This study supported the conclusion that the self-concept of students with LD is fairly similar to their non-LD peers in all areas but intellectual/academics. The lower academic self-perceptions probably reflect an accurate appraisal of real academic difficulties. Nevertheless, such accurate self-appraisal does not seem to prevent students with LD from feeling fairly good about themselves. Further, special education settings do not appear to have much of a differential effect on global self-worth and on more specific domains of competence (Bear, 2002, 418). On the other hand, Fuchs et al. (2002, 31) tried to identify the skill areas in which secondary students with learning disabilities exhibit differential reading performance on narrative versus expository text. For their study, 111 high school students in special and remedial education classes were administered two narrative and two expository passages, with the order of presentation counterbalanced across subjects. Results indicated that students had more difficulty with expository text than with narrative text in terms of reading fluency and comprehension. However, effects for comprehension were mediated by the type of question asked. Based on estimates of independent reading word counts, students who read independently for at least 10 minutes each day appear to experience substantially higher rates of vocabulary growth than students who do very little independent reading (Adams, 1990; Anderson & Nagy, 1991). Unfortunately, students who struggle with reading often fail to engage in the volume of independent reading necessary to significantly improve vocabulary development (Baker, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998). For students with learning disabilities, strategies for contextual word learning are also less proficient (Pany, Jenkins, & Schreck, 1982). As a result of ineffective word learning strategies, students with disabilities have a fragmented and less complete knowledge of words, as well as a narrow understanding of particular word features (Swanson, 1986). Overall, differences in the amount of independent reading, lack of strategies to learn words from context, and diffuse word knowledge appear to be the most critical obstacles to vocabulary development for students with disabilities (Stahl & Shiel, 1999). Because learning vocabulary during independent reading is very inefficient for students with reading difficulties, vocabulary and word learning skills must be taught. Yet, current practice deemphasizes vocabulary instruction despite the established robust and reciprocal relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension (Snow, 2002) In the above context, guided by a collaborative partnership/professional development model, Abbott et al. (2003, 95) hypothesized that teachers would implement and sustain their use of a range of new evidence-based practices and that these practices would produced accelerated levels and rates of growth in classroom reading behaviors broadly across students and in curriculum-based measurement (CBM) reading fluency. Results over 3 years indicated the following: (a) teachers did implement new evidence-based practices; (b) use of these practices with kindergarten and first-grade cohorts was associated with larger slopes in silent reading in second grade, a common point in time, compared to an older third-grade cohort not exposed to these strategies and to students at risk and with disabilities, who did not differ in their levels of classroom reading behavior; (c) classroom reading behaviors occurred most often in the presence of peer tutors, reading partners, or teacher-led one-on-one, small-group, or independent instructional arrangements as compared to entire group, teacher-led instruction; (d) growth in reading fluency was substantial overall; however, comparison of cohorts progress at second grade indicated no differences in CBM fluency growth associated with students differential histories of exposure to evidence-based practices, whereas differences in growth as a function of level of risk were found. Students at high risk progressed more slowly in attaining reading fluency than did typical students and low-risk students. However, it should be noticed that instructional design and individualized support must take into account the literacy challenges many students with disabilities bring into the middle grades. For example, students with learning disabilities are less likely than their normally achieving peers to be strategic readers and writers. They are less likely to use the comprehension strategies that good readers use intuitively, such as self-questioning, prediction, summarizing, and rereading, or to use composing strategies such as webbing, rereading their writing, and self-editing. Even when these students know about these strategies, they call on them less appropriately or flexibly (Graham, Harris, MacArthur, & Schwartz, 1991, in Chiarelli et al. 2001, 47) The reading scores of 461 students with learning disabilities in a single district were followed across 5 years as the district implemented a state-mandated accountability plan and large scale testing program. The accountability program included grade-level proficiency standards for students and cash incentives for school staff to increase student growth. Student growth was assessed with a regression-based growth formula based on the typical progress of students across a school year at each grade. The districts performance with students with learning disabilities improved in terms of mean reading score and percent proficient in reading in elementary school across the 5 years. State standards for growth established in general education appeared to offer a challenging, but achievable, goal for special education services at the district level (Schulte et al., 2001, 487) On the other hand, the study of Mclaughlin et al. (2002, 213) showed that students with disabilities included in general education classrooms achieved better outcomes on some measures than did their peers in pullout programs and comparable outcomes on others. Five key findings can be drawn from this study. First, students with LD served in inclusive classrooms achieved higher course grades in language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies than students with LD in pullout programs. Second, students with LD achieved higher scores on language and mathematics ITBS subtests than did students with LD in pullout programs. Third, students with LD served in inclusive classrooms demonstrated comparable scores to those in pullout programs on reading, writing, and mathematics subtests of a state proficiency test. Again, the standard curriculum focus and accommodations for LD appear to be factors in positive student outcomes. Fourth, students with LD in inclusive classrooms did not experience more in-school or out-of-school suspensions than did students in pullout programs. This suggests that increased demands of full-time general education placement do not result in greater acting-out behavior. Finally, students with LD served in inclusive classrooms attended more clays of school than those in pullout programs. Better attendance may be an indication of greater student satisfaction with inclusive services. A method that could be used when teaching students with learning disabilities is RTI. Potential benefits cited by RTI (responsiveness to intervention) proponents (Learning Disability Quarterly, 261) include (a) earlier identification of students with LD using a problem-solving approach rather than an ability-achievement discrepancy formula with the expectation of minimizing "wait to fail," (b) reduction in the number of students referred for special education, (c) reduction in the overidentification of minority students, (d) data that are maximally relevant to instruction, (e) focus on student outcomes with increased accountability, and (6) promotion of shared responsibility and collaboration. On the other hand, while RTI seems to encourage addressing the needs of students at risk (Learning Disability Quarterly, 261), the use of RTI for eligibility purposes has raised questions about whether RTI is prone to systemic errors in identifying students with LD. For example, some high-ability students with intellectual strengths and support may achieve in the normal range and be denied the individualized instruction enabling them to make academic progress consistent with their ability. Although it is generally agreed that RTI can identify a pool of at-risk students, it does not appear to be sufficient to identify a specific learning disability. It may, however, serve as an important component of an evaluation for special education eligibility. Research data from large-scale implementation of RTI are needed to determine the efficacy of RTI for differentiating a specific learning disability from other disabilities and students without disabilities. In the above context, Pedrotty et al. (2000, 250) tried to determine the effects of a multicomponent reading intervention (word identification, fluency, comprehension) implemented by teacher teams on the reading outcomes of students with reading disabilities as well as low- and average-achieving students. Overall, the results indicate that most of the students made gains on all three measures and that informal interviews with teachers revealed that they perceived that they benefited from professional development in reading. Moreover, a meta-analysis conducted by Swanson and Hoskyn (1998) concluded that the following are important components for teaching skills to secondary students: (a) using small, interactive group instruction; (b) using directed questioning and responses; (c) breaking tasks down into component parts and fading prompts and cues; and (d) using extended practice with feedback. One empirically based instructional strategy that incorporates these skills and has been shown to be effective for teaching academic skills in classrooms is class-wide peer tutoring (Cook, Scruggs, Mastropieri, & Casto, 1985-1986; Delquardi, Greenwood, Whorton, Carta, & Hall, 1986). Available research has shown that having secondary students with disabilities act as tutors to low-achieving nondisabled students increases mathematics achievement for both tutors and tutees (Mellberg, 1980; Roach et al., 1983). Similarly, Maher (1984) showed that secondary students with behavior disorders could successfully tutor younger students with mental retardation, increasing mathematic scores for both the tutor and the tutee. Combined, these three studies demonstrate that acting as a peer tutor can increase the mathematics scores of secondary students with disabilities (Calhoon et al., 2003, 240) A central finding from the study of Alber et al. (2002) is that structured worksheet homework assignments had positive effects on the classroom performance of general education students as well as students with disabilities. This is important, in that changes in practice within general education classrooms that are targeted only to the students with disabilities are not regarded as very practical by classroom teachers (Jayanthi, Epstein, Polloway, & Bursuck, 1996). Rather, classroom teachers are more likely to implement whole class, as compared to individualized, changes in practice (Putnam, 1992) A series of very common methods for the assessment of performance of students with disabilities are the direct writing assessment methods--which examine actual student writing samples--have received considerable attention because they are considered to have high face and content validity (Stiggins, 1982). More specifically, the two primary methods for directly scoring writing samples are "holistic," in which subjective judgments are used to rank or rate papers, and "atomistic," which consider discrete, countable components of the written product (Isaacson, 1985). The holistic evaluations carried out in this study resulted in a single, global judgment of writing quality (Spandel, 1981), while the atomistic indexes, including "number of correct word sequences" and "number of correctly spelled words," yielded counts, averages, and proportions or percents (Deno, Marston, & Mirkin, 1982). While direct holistic evaluations may be more suited to a "writing process" instructional approach (Lynch & Jones, 1989), the atomistic indexes are suited to an instructional approach based on building mastery of subskills. Smith et al. (2004, 381) present an alternative method for teaching students with disabilities. According to their study an optional method of teaching regarding this category of students is the 3-2-1 strategy. There are three vital components of the 3-2-1 strategy. First, students summarize important points from text. Second, students share insights about what aspects of passages are most interesting or intriguing to them. Finally, students are given opportunities to ask questions about the text. The 3-2-1 strategy requires students to participate in summarizing ideas from text. It encourages students to think independently and invites them to become personally engaged in the text. Students can use the 3-2-1 chart as a strategy while they read a textbook, a novel, an article, or other instructional text, or use it as a postreading activity. Teachers must first model the use of the strategy to students and discuss their thinking processes, the meanings they constructed, and the ways they benefited from the strategy The trends towards increased academic rigor and increased inclusion of students with disabilities in general education classrooms has presented teachers with the challenge of planning and implementing instructional strategies that are effective for all students. One important aspect of instruction with which teachers must contend is assigning homework on a daily basis. Individual homework modifications may not be implemented appropriately or consistently in general education classrooms because they are often viewed as time-consuming and impractical by many general education teachers. Therefore, it is important for teachers to adopt universal homework practices that will benefit the wide range of student abilities represented in their classrooms (Alber et al., 2002, 183) One of the challenges for curriculum planning for a student with severe disabilities is that curriculum must be individualized (Knowlton, 1998). Most of the curriculum guides that emerged in the 1980s included a process for identifying priority skills for Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) (cf. Ford et al., 1989; Giangreco et al., 1993). Functional curriculum guides were typically viewed as a catalog from which to select specific skills rather than encompassing the scope and sequence of skills all students would learn (Wilcox & Bellamy, 1987). Recent literature on creating access to the general curriculum has reemphasized using the IEP process to define the students curriculum. Wehmeyer, Lattin, and Agran (2001) proposed using IEPs as a decision-making process to enable teams to determine the students formal curriculum. In extending standards to create alternate assessments, states have struggled with the tension between defining an outcome for all students and offering a catalog of skills from which teachers could select relevant targets. Wehmeyer et al. (2001) cautioned that focusing on state general education standards does not mean teaching only general curricula; students continue to need instruction related to their life skill and transition needs. In extending standards, professionals have struggled with how much to allow access to general academic curricula (fitting all students in existing standards) versus introducing additional functional standards With increasing emphasis being placed on access to the general curriculum, Ford, Davern, and Schnorr (2001) noted that states tended to use one of three approaches to extend their standards to include students with significant disabilities. The first method was to simplify the general education standards to find something that a student with severe disabilities could do to meet the standard. The result was lists of specific skills that are needed to participate in a particular activity but that are not necessarily high-priority outcomes. For example, these simplified standards might be to "touch a relief map" or "match a picture of the local mayor to the city." A second approach was to redefine the state standards to be functional skills. The relationship between the skill and standard, however, was sometimes difficult to justify. For example, a social studies standard to develop historical perspective might be redefined as "use a personal calendar." A third alternative was to extend standards through the use of such foundational skills as "enjoys literature; reads books/materials for a variety of purposes." Teachers would then choose the skills to be used as performance outcomes for students. On the other hand, NCLB (2002) requires schools to report the percentage of students who meet state goals in reading, math, and science for several target groups, including students with disabilities. Reporting results for alternate assessments will be enhanced if scores parallel those for statewide testing. For example, if a state has four levels of performance for a criterion to meet state expectations, communicating alternate assessment outcomes will be easier if this measure has parallel levels. When scores are aggregated, students in alternate assessments who achieve outcomes at the highest levels should be recognized as such, rather than having their outcomes assigned the lowest score because they took an alternate assessment. Creating the opportunity for students in the alternate assessment system to achieve high levels sets the expectation that these students will not be "left behind" in standards for improvements in school achievement. Researchers in Kentucky, a high-stakes accountability state that has been including all student scores in this way, have found a correlation between alternate assessment scores and school accountability scores (Turner, Baldwin, Kleinert, & Kearns, 2000). Chapter III – Conclusions, Implications and Recommendations According to the study of Ford et al. (2001, 285) the role of special educators to the mental development of students with disabilities is crucial. In this context, it is expected that – for example - the role of the special educator is to develop in-depth understanding of the nature and impact of disability on a child and the influence of context on a childs learning and development while it is assumed that special educators would have a working knowledge of appropriate assessment strategies to gain insight into students strengths, learning challenges, and the impact of instruction. They must be mindful of sources of bias and the potential for misidentification and recognize the need for communication supports or alternative response formats. In addition, special educators begin with a strong understanding of the general education curriculum, which serves as a context/ framework within which they adapt and/or develop specialized instruction to meet the needs of students with disabilities. They develop expertise in specialized approaches, materials, programs, and assistive technologies to meet the high-priority needs of students who are not showing success even with adaptations to the general curriculum. On the other hand, teacher of students with learning disabilities should not be differentiated regarding the development of the students’ writing or their oral abilities but they should try to help them to improve these two abilities to an equal level. Research on the richness of vocabulary used in sources of spoken and written language has revealed that speech is "lexically impoverished" when compared to written language. Although this seems counterintuitive given the often simplistic nature of childrens literature, "the relative rarity of the words in childrens books is, in fact, greater than that in all of the adult conversation, except for courtroom testimony"; In other words, childrens stories are valuable sources of rare and unique words as well as rich and diverse vocabulary (Edwards et al., 2004, 299) If discrepancies occur between verbal and written work, or if a student with advanced abilities has obvious problems in certain areas in school, a teacher or parent should consider the existence of learning disabilities. Students with learning disabilities who are also academically talented or who possess advanced abilities in one or more academic areas often are misunderstood by their teachers or their parents. Some of these students are extremely verbal but may not be able to demonstrate their talents in their written work. Teachers may believe that these students are lazy or simply are not using appropriate care or attention to detail. Some of these students may only manifest their learning disabilities in upper elementary, middle, or high school, after having been excellent students in primary or early elementary grades. It would be helpful to provide professional development information about talented students with learning disabilities. Students who are both gifted and learning disabled may need different types of programs from those provided by the learning disabilities specialist in their schools. (Mcguire et al., 1997, 474) Regarding the above presented we could state that the primary obstacle to sustaining and scaling up sound practices in early reading is the dearth of informed instructional leaders who can press a well-articulated initiative for several years (Foorman et al., 2004). These instructional leaders should be principals, specialists, and reading teachers who have successfully taught a diverse group of students to read and who understand, from a systemic perspective, how to motivate and mobilize their colleagues to be successful reading teachers. Instructional leaders working successfully in impoverished urban environments are often hired away by suburban schools, where salaries are higher, experience levels and longevity of the faculty are higher, buildings are newer and better maintained, and teacher-student ratios are lower (Darling-Hammond & Post, 2000). Other, more peripheral obstacles are also daunting. One such obstacle is slowness of teacher preparation programs and professional development programs to promote research-based practices in reading (NRP, 2000; Snow et al., 1998). 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