Effect of student-based Special Education Teaching Methodology on Special Children. Research Paper

Introduction

Implementing the child –based teaching strategy will be physically, mentally, and emotionally advantageous to all parties within the classroom environment. The research focuses on the resolving the problem statement.

The research also focuses on the history of the strategic learning disabled teaching strategy. The research includes the researcher’s reflection as a current special education teacher. Student based teaching strategy improves the learning disabled student’s learning capacity.

Statement of the Problem

Effect of Student-based Special Education Teaching Methodology on Special Children.

Statement of the Purpose

The purpose of the study is to determine if the student-based special education teaching methodology improves the special student’s learning process.

Definitions Related to the Topic

Special student – a student in the elementary years with learning disability.

Special education – teaching methodology different from the normal teaching strategy implemented in classrooms for normal learning children.

Gifted student – children with higher than normal intelligence quotients, usual IQ’ of 140 and above.

Autistic student – Child with neural –related learning disability.

Mentally retarded – prior identification of persons who are not normal learners.

ADHD student – Child who is hyperactive.

SPED teacher – The special education teacher using one’s dedication and noble spirit to go that extra mile to equip the learning disabled child with intellectual and emotional resources to survive the future complex teenage, adult, and elderly world.

Literature of study

Special educational teaching strategy

Special education focuses on young students with special learning needs. Likewise, Vicari (2004) proposed the topic includes teaching children with communication challenges, emotional disabilities, behavioral disabilities, physical disabilities, and development disabilities. In terms of issues related to study, special students need an alternative teaching methodology.

The teaching strategy deviates from the normal teaching methodology used to impart knowledge to students without learning disabilities. To be more effective in training the students with special learning needs, the normal class size is reduced to numbers conducive to comfortable and stress-free special student classroom environment.

Students with special learning abilities including gifted students. Gifted students are those with high intelligence quotients. However, the general impression of the word special student describes persons having less than normal learning capacities. The special students include children previously classified as mentally retarded.

However, the term mentally retarded has been changed to student with special learning needs to avoid charges of discriminating such students. Another group of students with special learning abilities include those classified as having attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD.

Vicari (2004) emphasized neuropsychological research allowed various cognitive indexing of student with intellectual disabilities of various etiologies. For example, students with Down William’s syndrome or WS vividly display glaring impairment in some visuospatial skills, specifically praxic-constructive terms. The research shows children with intellectual disabilities have slower than normal learning capacities.

Similar studies in long term memory processing have vividly shown people with intellectual disabilities have diffuse impairment of the declarative abilities and relative preservation of the special student’s implicit memory processing.

Further, Pijl Pijl (1998) reiterated within the Netherlands community, student with special learning abilities are referred to as separate schools for the educable mentally retarded or EMR or another classification, Learning Disabled or LD. The community’s preoccupation is to determine the possibility of decreasing the number of special education appointments.

The research focused on the discussion concerning the difference in sizes of the various cognitive abilities between the students in normal or regular classroom learning conditions and the students falling under the category, special education students (EMR and LD).

The findings of a research conducted in Netherlands comparing students with normal learning abilities and students with special learning abilities indicate children with normal learning abilities have different learning capacity when compared to the learning capacity of students with learning disabilities.

The findings unquestionably prove the children with special learning needs have slower learning speed or capacity when compared to the learning capacity of normal students.

In addition, a related study conducted by Petrin (2011) focused on students’ opinions, ambitions, and needs of an estimated 400 student samples classified as learning disabled.

The samples were taken from the entire estimated 6,600 students enrolled in high schools. Irrespective of the students’ disability status, the rural high school students with unfavorable perceptions of the classroom environment had less defined postsecondary learning education plans and lesser aspirations to finish a college course within the most opportune time period.

Consequently, Mathew Irvin (2011) discovered the students with learning disabilities have lesser interest to finish a postgraduate degree course.

When comparing the students with learning disabilities and students with normal learning abilities, the rural students with learning disabilities had more negative impressions of the classroom environment compared to children with normal learning abilities.

However, many students with learning disabilities moving through school environments assimilating favorable classroom encounters prefer to enroll in post secondary education programs.

Likewise, Judith Meece (2011) conducted a study of a randomly selected group of students taken from 7,376 student population. The student samples taken were classified as one group of 512 students was identified as learning disabled. Another group of 90 students was classified as language difficulty learners.

The test included teacher -assisted interpersonal competence scale teacher test focused on resolving the learning disabled students’ adjustment to seven significant factors. The seven factors include internalizing, affiliative, shy, Olympian, academic, and aggressive.

The results of the findings indicate the students with emotional and behavioral disorders or EBD had been overrepresented in terms of multi task or aggressive high risk factor profiles.

Likewise, students with learning disabilities or LD were overrepresented in both the multi task and disengaged or non-aggressive high risk profiles configurations. On the other hand, students with English Language Learning disabilities or ELLD were overrepresented in the disengaged configuration part of the test.

Lucy Hoole (2011) emphasizes in another research students with learning disabilities felt discriminated in school and the community as a whole. The learning disabled students felt they were treated unfairly and with glaring inequality.

The survey respondents expressed their concern for government to increase its monitoring responsibility to ensure that students with learning disabilities are given a better treatment in order to make the students with learning disabilities feel more comfortable, welcome, and part of the normal school and home environment.

Edward Kuhlman (Kuhlman, 1994;5) emphasized “The media, notably, have come to dominate the society, and the exponential increase in and distribution of these information outlets have revolutionized the social system in unimagined ways. Marshall McLuhan ‘global village’ has eradicated distances, and internationalism dictates

local concerns and interests. The rate of change has been staggering”. This clearly shows that the classroom learning activities are rearranged very rapidly to control, and obsolescence is calculated in generations that seemingly spring up and mature overnight. Learning in the special education classroom includes lessons on computers, automobiles, societies, or civilizations.

The concept of “generation” no longer refers to the traditional incremental learning process; with time-lapsed speed, technologies render inventions and innovations have faded into thin air or become obsolete in rapid process, and the rapacious appetite of modern society for special education classroom learning change and novelty transforms into a mandate for more and different, if not better.

Furthermore, Garvey (1994;77) theorized “More than two millennia ago Socrates said that the secret of life is to ‘know thyself.’ The key to success in life and in education is identity. A knowledge of oneself is prerequisite to knowledge of anyone or anything else. Augustine believed that we start with knowledge of self and proceed to knowledge of God”.

All learning in the classroom setting begins with the basic understanding of one’s inmost being. The ontological issue, most succinctly voiced by Hamlet, involves being and identity. To answer Hamlet’s query (to be or not to be) positively requires a clear affirmation of identity. It seems so elementary that it should not require extensive discussion.

Technological societies are barraged with people whose sense of self has been underdeveloped, weakened, or damaged. The modern 21st century classroom environment for all its talk of fulfillment and self-definition has become a poor place for people to find themselves. In fact, the current 21st century world is notoriously a place of being lost.

The comments pertaining to learning challenges among the mentally challenged frustration take a myriad forms and voices in the students’ classroom studies. It has become a truism, an obvious fact of industrialized society that historical ways of achieving and maintaining identity are threatened by the intrusiveness of impersonal technology.

Further, David Chard (1997) emphasized attention deficit disorder (ADD) is a significantly new diagnostic identification mark for students in the school environment. The disorder includes a chronic neurobiological mental situation characterized by the not so normally appropriate development attention skills, impulsivity, and, in many situations, hyperactivity.

The identifying name preferred by several experts, such as the United States Department of Education, to identify these children. Another choice in terms of diagnostic terminology is preferred by the American Psychiatric Association – for example, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADH. The disorder is clearly discussed in the psychology book, DSM-IV.

The initials can also be written as Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition. Further research indicated both ADD and ADHD disorders were clearly discussed as having the same disability and are often implemented interchangeably.

Further, Edward Kuhlman (1994;151) reiterated “experiential education provides an approach to learning that emphasizes student contacts with situations and environments outside the boundaries of traditional schooling. Education has in the last decades become increasingly institutionalized, overly structuralized, and bureaucratized”.

Current school learning facilities (classrooms) and school programs combine to keep students within the confines of artificial classroom environments and away from the realities of everyday life outside the four walls of the classroom.

The implementation of sophisticated technology, and necessary permission to power sources to run the technology has, of course, institutionalized classroom learning environment in the American way of American life. Medical services are provided in complex educational facilities that rely upon a large section of technologies for diagnosis and treatment of classroom learning disorders.

Businesses with their ependence upon elaborate communication and data-processing networks require huge organizations and buildings. Schools, as well, both pre- and postsecondary, have developed “edifice complexes,” and sprawling, often aesthetically unappealing, structures, not uncommonly isolated from the everyday demands of life have sprouted all over the educational landscape.

Institutionalization has potentially damaging effects. Contacts with natural environments are necessary to sustain lives that are healthy and lived responsibly. The lack of meaningful critical conversation between the teacher and the student, as sensory deprivation researches have demonstrated, distort views of and involvements with reality.

Steps in the creation of the rublirc

Make a list of what you want the students to accomplish through your assignment

Addition of numbers (Math Subject)

Organize your list from most important to least important

• Add single digit numbers
• Add 2 digit numbers.
• Add 3 digit numbers.

Decide on an overall point value for the assignment

In terms of points, each student gets a grade of 5 points for solving each correct math computation. The student gets a perfect 100 for answering all 20 addition problems. For example, a student having 15 correct answers gets a rubric grade of 75 points. Another student who gets 7 correct answers gets a rubric grade of 35 points. Lastly, another student having 18 correct answers gets a rubric grade of 90 points.

Assign each item on your ranked list a percentage value out of 100 percent

In terms of percentage, each addition math problem is equivalent to five percent. The student who answers all 20 addition math questions correctly gets a rubric percentage grade of 100 percent. In the same manner, the student who answers all 20 addition questions correctly gets a perfect 100 percent rubric result. Likewise, a student having 15 correct addition math answers gets a rubric grade of 75 percent.

Another student who gets 7 correct addition math answers gets a rubric grade of 35 percent. Lastly, another student having 18 correct addition math answers gets a rubric grade of 90 percent. The rubric is applied to all students, without regard for their mental capacity, emotional status, or physical condition.

The addition math rubric is student-centered. This means the teacher will not move on to the next math topic, subtraction, until almost all of the students in the K math class generate high addition math rubric results. Thus, the teacher must give in and tailor the teaching strategy to fit the learning capacity, ability, or comprehension of the special education students.

Multiply your total point value from step 3 by each item’s assigned percentage to arrive at the point value for that item

In terms of the next subtraction lesson, Greer (2002) emphasized, Subtraction, the rubric used in the addition math problem will be applied. In terms of percentage, each subtraction math problem is equivalent to five percent. The student who answers all 20 subtraction math questions correctly gets a rubric percentage grade of 100 percent.

In the same manner, the student who answers all 20 subtraction questions correctly gets a perfect 100 percent rubric result. Likewise, a student having 15 correct subtraction answers gets a rubric grade of 75 percent. Another student who gets 7 correct subtraction math answers gets a rubric grade of 35 percent. Lastly, another student having 18 correct subtraction math answers gets a rubric grade of 90 percent.

The subtraction math rubric is applied to all students, without regard for their mental capacity, emotional status, or physical condition. The rubric is student-centered. This means the teacher will not move on to the next two math topic, multiplication and division, until almost all of the students in the K math class generate impressive subtraction math rubric results.

Thus, the teacher must give in and tailor the teaching strategy to fit the learning capacity, ability, or comprehension of the special education students. To be more effective, the students will be supplied with the rubric criteria on the first day of class. The teacher will explain the nuances of the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division rubrics.

In addition, the students are given another rubric for attention, class recitation. The rubric for attendance is as follows: all students are given 100 percent attendance rubric starting grade. The students are deducted five percent for each day of absence.

Upon reaching 20 absences, the student gets an attendance rubric of 0 percent. The attendance rubric is explained to the students on the first day of class to keep them aware of the consequences of their failure to attend class lessons regularly.

An excuse letter with an attached medical doctor’s certificate will excuse the students from the implementation of the rubric attendance deduction to the tune of five percent for each day of absence.

In terms of class recitation rubric, each student is orally asked questions pertaining to the day’s class topic. Each orally correct answer merits a two percent. A student answering all 50 correct oral math questions will receive 100 percent rubric grade.

Another student having 35 correct oral subtraction answers gets a rubric grade of 70 percent. Another student who gets 7 correct oral subtraction math answers gets a rubric grade of 14 percent. Lastly, another student having 28 correct subtraction math answers gets a rubric grade of 56 percent.

History of the study

Teaching Methodology for learning disabled students

The students under this researchers’ mentorship are youngsters. The children are treated just like other normal students. However, additional time is accorded to clarifying the lessons for the day. The special education teacher focuses the repetitive discussion of the topic to make the lessons more understandable. Robert Greer (2002) theorized the teacher uses the progressive mastery teaching strategy.

The progressive mastery teaching strategy states that the teacher does not proceed to the next lesson until the student finally gasps the important points of the current lessons. There are students with learning disabilities that can learn the day’s topic faster than another student with a different degree or type of learning disability.

One child is classified as Autistic. The teaching treatment of the autistic student is different from the treatment of the student diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or

The extra credits should not be offered to a selected few students. The entire classroom can easily feel disgusted when bias creeps into classroom scene when the teacher shows favoritism. Favoritism may come in the form of the teacher giving extra credit activities and the corresponding extra credits to only a few persons.

The other students may complain if the teacher exempts one student from the math quiz due to favoritism. In terms of fairness, the mentors must use one rubric standard for all the students. The difference in the extra credit standards should not precipitate to the discrimination of a student who prefers to work when compared to persons who prefer to sit silently inside the class and persons

To increase the number of students patronizing the teachers’ rubric, the teacher will explain in clear terms that extra credits should only be used if the other revenue generating accclean Likewise, the extra credits should be given sparingly to the entire class. The students may prefer to win more extra credit percentage points in order to compensate for the students’ laziness to study for the day’s lessons, quizzes, oral tests, mid terms exams, and other related tests.

Pros and cons

There are advantages of implementing the rubric on the student -based special education teaching methodology on special children. First, the child’s progress is the priority of the entire teaching strategy. The implementation of the progressive mastery teaching strategy, a child-centered teaching strategy) is tempered to go forward to be in step with the learning disability progress.

The teacher will not proceed to lesson 25 if the learning disability student has not learned the important points of the current lesson 24. Second, the child will not be overburdened with the lessons. In the normal class, the teacher moves along in accordance with the learning speed of the average class. Consequently, the slow learners will be left behind.

Consequently, the child may give up on trying one’s best to comprehend the lesson or the child can ask a friend, relative, or the tutor to explain the teacher’s confusing topics. Another advantage is the teacher is in a learning atmosphere.

The teacher tries to decipher every body language and words uttered by the learning disabled child as a request for help. The help may be to explain the lessons further, proceed to the next lesson’s topics, to disapprove of the teacher’s explanation or discussion of the topic as too complex or too boring.

The use of rubric in the preparation of the grades will remove bias in the minds of the students, parents, school administrators, and fellow faculty members.

The students can plot data on their personal rubric copy to determine the status of the students’ rubric grades. The students can easily track their own total performance during the entire classroom activities. The students can use the rubric to know what they need to do in order achieve their dream classroom grade.

There are disadvantages of implementing student based -based special education teaching methodology on special children. The teacher may not be able to cover all the assigned lessons for the entire school year if the learning disabled student is far too slow compared to the other disabled learning classmates.

Another disadvantage is the exhaustion on the teacher’s part. The teacher’s continuous repetition of the subject matter may take its toll on the teacher’s health, mental, and emotional well being. A child that shouts to the teacher may cause the teacher’s tempers to flare up.

A child’s preference to play toys instead of doing what the teacher teaches within the classroom environment may be cause some not so devoted teachers to finally call it quits. The hours spent to make lesson plans and adjusting to the different learning capacities of the students (both normal and learning-disabled are only some the very reasons why the teaching is a noble profession.

In terms of the advantages of giving special education students extra credit, the extra credit offers all special education students the opportunity to go the extra mile by focusing beyond the classroom textbooks. The extra credit activities, research assignments and others,will deepen the student’s academic stock of knowledge.

In addition, slow –learning students can keep up with the rest of the class by focusing on doing additional activities to increase their rubric percentage results.

In terms of disadvantage of the proposal to give extra credits, some students may prefer to focus on the extra credit activities to augment their poor class study habits. The students will feel lazy to study the lessons because they can easily get the same high rubric grade by doing many extra credit assignments. Also, the giving of too much extra credit may lessen the student’s desire to study more intently.

The intelligent students may feel the giving of extra credits is unfair to have similar rubric grades with less mentally gifted classmates. Likewise, some teachers feel lessens the students’ energy to excel in their test, and quizzes.

Reflection

Teaching is both a noble profession and a tedious job. The teacher must exert all efforts, to the point of exhaustion, to impart to the learning disabled child the important parts of the day’s lessons.

The teacher’s job is a noble profession for the salary counterpart is quite miniscule compared to the devotion, time, and patience spent by the teacher aiding the special student to be as equal or even surpass the lessons learned by students in a normal classroom environment.

The teaching profession is a rewarding profession. There would be no engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, priests, policemen, soldiers, and nurses if there were no teachers teaching those successful professions how read and write in their elementary years. This includes successful adult autistic, ADHD, and other learning disabled persons during their elementary years.

The satisfaction of unselfishly and painstakingly seeing the child learn a new knowledge that will equip the future mayor, United States president, senator, army general, and office clerk to survive during their teenage, adult, and elderly lives is enough reward for noble teachers like me.

Conclusion

Based on the above discussion, the student-based special education teaching methodology on special children is effective in increasing the learning disabled student’s learning capacity. The advantages of implementing student -based special education teaching methodology on special children far outweigh the disadvantages of not implementing such novel teaching strategy.

The success of the program is to cater the lessons to the child’s progress is the priority of the entire teaching strategy. The implementation of the progressive mastery teaching strategy, a child-centered teaching strategy) is advantageously tempered to go forward to be in step with the learning disabled student’s progress.

Indeed, implementing the child –based teaching strategy will be physically, mentally, and emotionally advantageous to both the learning disabled child and the noble and selfless teacher.

References

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