JAMES' CASE STUDY Case Study on James in IDEA

Case Study on James in IDEA

James is a six years old boy living with his parents in first grade. With his intellectual disability, he has been placed under special education classroom having 15 other students. James has some challenges related to learning due to the poor memory and delays in language development. One of the strengths that James has is that he is confident in school and is not easily frustrated. He can communicate effectively with adults but socializing with his peers is a challenge. One of the major challenges that he faces is the fact that he has low achievement in most of the academic areas. These include reading comprehension, mathematics, and written expressions. His interests are in sports, games although he is challenged by isolation from his peers. He has faced delays in cognitive, social and adaptive behavior skills in the classroom (Miller, Krockover, & Doughty, 2013). He lags behind the rest of the students regarding academic achievement because he may remember something today and forget it the next day.

The family is supportive because the members have taken steps towards addressing the issues facing their son. One of the things that they have done is to seek guidance on how they can help the child. However, the mother does not believe that the child has a disability. From her opinion, the child is normal and can learn just like the other children. After conducting a background check, I realized that the mother had objected the idea of putting James in a special education classroom. James is a child who can achieve great levels of academic achievement with the right assistance and help from his teachers and parents. Concerns revolve around the environment that the child stays in at home. In most cases, James isolates himself from the rest of the children in the family, which makes it hard for him to learn with the rest of the family. The concerns of the father are that despite the help he gets from school, the environment he lives in may not provide him with the best opportunity to learn well.

Case Study Methods

The case study was done by interviewing the parents and the teachers who handle him in school. The interviews were conducted on a...

The process involved the observations of James behavior for a cumulative time of 15 hours spread over six days. The focus of the observation was to track the levels of concentration that James has and to ensure that he is analyzed based on his strengths.
Summary

Academic Performance

James has issues to do with academic achievement due to his memory problem. On observation, I was able to find out that he forgets 70% of what he knew or had learned the previous day. His language development is also poor, which means that he has a challenge in reading. He cannot read well even without the guidance of the teacher. Besides, James is easily distracted from what is happening in class, which affects his understanding and concentration. Apart from reading, he has a challenge in mathematics and written expressions. His oral reading difficulties were evident as he kept on omitting some words or groups of words, substitution through replacing one or more words in the passage and mispronunciation of various words (Dell, Newton, & Petroff, 2016).

Hesitation before pronunciation was also evident, which made him lag behind the rest of the students in the classroom. He did not like the idea of being selected to read something in class or to answer a question. In some occasions, he gave the wrong answer when asked a question, which is an indication that he has a poor memory. His interests in the class included a drawing or any other activity that he could do alone without any interaction with the rest of the students. His test results were poor and could not be compared with those of the rest of the class. For example, his work in various areas revealed that he had a problem with the writing ability. He cannot transfer an idea from the board to his book with ease. Coupled with the lack of concentration, this made him lag behind the class in most aspects (Dell, Newton, & Petroff, 2016).

Social performance

Socially, James has various challenges that are not experienced by other students. This was according to the parents and the teachers who argued that he has difficulties getting along with the peers…