Accommodations and modifications for the learning disabled student - Essay Example

A disabled student is also just as much of a pulsating and precious human being as any other normal student.What goes on in a disabled student's mind A continuous sense of permanent deprivation reels in such a student almost all the while. Disabled students suffer perennially. They ask "Why" every second of their life. When they are alone and when they are in public and interactive situations - they are comparing in the depths of their nerves. They are tense from within most of the time. They are like this even when they are smiling and laughing and apparently relaxing.

This aspect further adds to their disability and difficulties. They just cannot come out of their mental frame of what others are able to do and what they are not able to do.This is a psychological phenomenon. A teacher and an instructor or facilitator has to enter the disabled mind. The life and difficulty of a disabled student has to be felt alive from within and without. A teacher has at least to imagine this reality of the special pupil especially in class eight. The disabled student in this eighth standard is entering into an adolescent age.

This stage throws out so many other psychological challenges of adolescence as well. Until this mundane psychology of the disabled is understood, their expectations and apprehensions cannot be met fruitfully only through varied adaptations, accommodations and modifications (. Latham H, Patricia, 2002).The list of disabilities is an endless inventory of deprivations. . There are a number of ways for dealing with learning of the disabled. These are generally used as Adaptation, Accommodation and Modifications.

For example, adaptations mean changes introduced into the environment, curricula, instruction and assessment etc. for leading a student learner to success. Adaptations are employed according to an individual student's needs. All accommodations and modifications are adaptations (Fuchs, L.S., and Fuchs, D., 1998, Winter). Accommodations provide a student equal access to learning and equal opportunity to demonstrate. Accommodations must not alter the content of the test or provide inappropriate assistance to the student within the context of the test.

Accommodations do not require special coding on an answer sheet. Accommodations do not bring any change in syllabus and instructions. Modifications represent substantial changes. These may be made in what a student has to learn and demonstrate. Changes may be introduced in the instructional level, the content or the performance criteria. All these changes provide a student with positive learning experiences, environments, and assessments based on individual needs and abilities. Modifications include oral reading, signing, the reading skills test and use of calculators etc.

When preceding modifications are made, due notation has to be recorded on the appropriate answer sheet (ANU, 1994).Despite diverse specifics of adaptations, accommodations and modifications of learning of the disabled, every disabled learner has to be considered as an individual and a distinctive person. Each one - even if having similar disability - possesses different and individual centered characteristics. The major challenge is that each individual disabled learner is wholesomely different and