Best practices in reading instruction for special education

Special Education

Best Practices of Reading Instruction for Special Education

There are several things to consider when looking for special education resources in the area of reading. They include the students, their background, program, best practices in reading instruction, analysis of the material for reading and fluency oral and reading. A basic structure for how to best teach reading to these students is vital. There are many reading programs available online and at the local library. Special education teachers also have access to key information and materials, as do schools and businesses that focus in reading training (Special Education Resources for Reading, n.d.).

Reading is the pivotal skill that allows children to achieve at high levels and become reflective, lifelong learners. Becoming a fluent reader is a prerequisite for success in any academic area and for success in our society. Furthermore, knowing how to read is related to personal resilience and overcoming social obstacles and, thus, has far-reaching positive effects. In the Nation's Report Card for fourth grade reading, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the reading scores of low performing children have generally declined over the last 10 years while those of high performing students increased. The reading performance of middle and high school students also remains a major concern. Only 30% of eighth graders scored at or above the proficient level and 28% of eighth-grade students were functioning below the basic.

Students with chronic behavioral challenges have made little or no reading progress, especially those students beyond the second grade. These students are described as non-responders. Non-responders are those students who, despite participating in core and supplementary reading instructional programs, fail to acquire beginning reading skills within the normal range. Non-responsiveness does not seem to be limited to students with learning disabilities; researchers have found that the majority of students with chronic behavioral difficulties experience reading difficulties. Reports on the prevalence of reading difficulties among students with emotional disturbance (ED) have ranged from 31% to 81%. Thus, the majority of students with chronic behavior challenges have moderate to severe reading problems that are very difficult to improve over time. Given the difficulty educators face in building the reading skills of these students, it is not surprising that those who serve these students have described them as troubled and troubling (Benner, 2005).

What works to improve the responsiveness of students with behavioral challenges? Educators and researchers have identified four best practices for improving the responsiveness of students with behavioral challenges to reading instruction. First, provide explicit instruction. There is a great deal of evidence supporting the use of explicit instruction procedures and instructional design principles on students with behavior problems. Explicit instruction procedures include the following:

(a) begin the lesson with a short review of previous, prerequisite learning,

(b) begin the lesson with a short statement of goals,

(c) present new material in small steps, with student practice following each step,

(d) give clear and detailed instructions and explanations,

(e) provide a high level of active practice for all students,

(f) ask a large number of questions, check for student understanding, and obtain responses from all students,

(g) guide students during initial practice,

(h) provide systematic feedback and corrections, and (i) provide explicit instruction and practice for seatwork exercises, and where necessary, monitor students during seatwork (Benner, 2005).

The effective instructional design principles framework incorporates the following six organizing principles:

(1) big ideas, which are the fundamental concepts and principles that facilitate efficient acquisition of knowledge in a content area,

(2) mediated scaffolding, which refers to the personal guidance, assistance, and support that teachers, materials, or tasks provide a learner early in the content learning process,

(3) conspicuous strategies, which are a series of steps that proficient learners purposely follow in solving a problem or achieving an outcome,

(4) strategic integration, which is the combining of essential information in meaningful

ways that results in new and more complex learner understanding of a topic,

(5) primed background knowledge, which involves providing learners a brief reminder that acts as a memory trigger and allows the learner to remember what it is that needs to be done in order to solve a task or retrieve pertinent information, and (6) judicious review, which involves practice of previously learned information that is sufficient enough so that the learner performs the task or recalls the information without

hesitation, distributed over time, cumulative, and varied in such a way that the knowledge is applied to a wide variety of situations and settings (Benner, 2005).

It is essential that educators combine explicit instruction procedures with effective instructional design principles to build reading skills of students with behavioral difficulties. Such instruction not only improves the reading skills of students with challenging behaviors but also decreases the interfering influence of problem behavior on instruction. Explicit instruction provided to students with behavior problems should be of sufficient intensity and take place early on (Benner, 2005).

In its simplest form, evidence-based reading instruction is a particular program or compilation of instructional practices which have proven to have a record of success. They are reliable, trustworthy, and contain valid evidence to suggest that when the program is used with a particular group of children, the children can be anticipated to make sufficient gains in reading achievement. Other expressions that are sometimes used to convey the same idea are research-based instruction and scientifically-based research. This fairly simple concept becomes more complicated when it is attempted to define the types of evidence that are reliable and trustworthy indicators of effectiveness. In general, educators agree that such evidence should be as follows:

objective -- data that any evaluator would identify and interpret similarly valid -- data that adequately represent the tasks that children need to accomplish to be successful readers reliable -- data will remain essentially unchanged if collected on a different day or by a different person systematic -- data that were collected according to a rigorous design of either experimentation or observation refereed -- data that have been approved for publication by a panel of independent reviewers (What is Evidence-Based Reading Instruction, 2002).

In addition to evaluating the quality of the data by which programs or practices are judged, teachers also must examine the fit, of the evidence. In other words, teachers might ask if the children in their classrooms closely resemble the children from whom the evidence was collected: Are they the same age? Do they have similar language and cultural backgrounds? Do they have similar learning profiles? Teachers might also ask if the learning contexts are the same: Are class sizes and teacher -- student ratios similar? Is the allocation of instructional time and resources similar? Do teachers have similar funds of knowledge? Has more than one study produced particular findings? If the answer to all of these questions is yes, then teachers might conclude that there is a good fit and that their students might be expected to make similar achievement gains with the same program or practice. if, however, the answers to some or all of these questions is no, then it is difficult to predict whether similar results might be achieved (What is Evidence-Based Reading Instruction, 2002).

Research studies used to collect evidence about programs and practices may have a variety of designs. In general, studies that demonstrate effectiveness using experimental designs which are studies that compare results from the program or practices of interest to results from a control group with random assignment to the groups and quasi-experimental designs which are studies that do not use random assignment to the program or comparison group, but use adequate statistical procedures to control preexisting differences give the strongest evidence of effects of a program or practice on the average student, particularly when the studies are carried out in naturalistic environments. Quantitative studies such as these generally investigate program effects on relatively large numbers of students. In addition, they can be aggregated by using meta-analysis. In contrast, qualitative studies typically focus on small samples or on individuals and are especially valuable in helping teachers understand how particular programs or approaches affect individuals who may not represent the mainstream or average student. No single study has ever established a program or practice as effective. It is the convergence of evidence from a variety of study designs that is ultimately scientifically convincing. When evaluating studies and claims of evidence, educators must not determine whether the study is quantitative or qualitative in nature, but rather if the study meets the standards of scientific research. That is, does it involve rigorous and systematic empirical inquiry that is data-based (What is Evidence-Based Reading Instruction, 2002).

The format of instruction greatly impacts the responsiveness of students with behavior difficulties to instruction. Instruction delivered in a one-on-one format either by trained volunteers, peers, or teachers has been recommended by educators who serve students with challenging behaviors. Moreover, it is important to note that in complex areas such as basic reading skill development it may be necessary for teachers to use scripted programs built upon explicit instruction procedures and effective design principles. It would not only be time consuming and expensive for each classroom teacher to develop an effective basic reading skills curriculum but such a curriculum is also fraught with a high degree of error. There is compelling evidence that supports the use of scripted programs rather than teacher-developed approaches to teach complex skills (Benner, 2005).

Second, apply positive behavioral supports to manage the behaviors of students with behavioral difficulties during reading instruction. Researchers have found that the problem behaviors of students with emotional disturbance are moderately to strongly relate to their responsiveness to reading intervention. Coercion theory offers an important rationale for the use of positive behavioral supports to improve responsiveness. Coercion theory asserts that many students with severe behavioral challenges have learned that arguing; escalation, confrontation, aggression, and noncompliance often lead to escape from undesirable tasks such as homework completion or from compliance with repeated requests to behave appropriately, for example. Escape/avoidance of undesirables becomes the function that drives many of the problem behaviors displayed by these students and their negative interactions with others (Benner, 2005).

Due to the severity and frequency of disruptive behaviors, a student may be allowed to escape or avoid many academic tasks over time while the achievement gap between them and their peers continues to broaden. Teachers should be careful not to allow students to escape/avoid academic tasks that they are capable of completing. Although allowing the student to escape from such tasks may provide teachers a temporary break from the problem behaviors of students such a response actually increases the likelihood that the student will engage in problem behaviors to escape undesirable tasks in the future (Benner, 2005).

Third, the reading skills of students with behavioral challenges will be increased by building automaticity in phonemic awareness, phonics, and reading fluency. In other words, educators should use instructional techniques that enhance students' ability to effortlessly complete foundational academic tasks without conscious thought to step-by-step process. Researchers have found that fluency, or automaticity, appears to be the most influential skill in the development of the academic functioning of students with behavioral challenges (Benner, 2005).

When foundational reading tasks become automatic the brain recognizes these simple and familiar tasks, processes the information, and automatically applies the correct rules to the procedure without immense cognitive effort. Because fluent readers do not have to concentrate on decoding the words, they can focus their attention on what the text means, whereas less fluent readers must focus their attention on figuring out the words, leaving them little attention for understanding the text. Researchers have found that building automaticity with reading tasks not only improves overall academic functioning, but also increases neurological activity in the area of the brain that deals with automatic retrieval of information (Benner, 2005).

Finally, use Curriculum-Based Measurement to monitor the automaticity of students. Based on over 30 years of scientific research, CBM was designed to assess and build academic fluency or automaticity. A typical CBM requires the student to complete brief, timed exercises using materials drawn directly from the child's academic program. Passage of recent legislation (e.g., Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004) highlights the need to assess educational need, write measurable goals, monitor progress, report progress to parents, and make revisions in the IEP to address any unexpected lack of progress. The use of ongoing progress monitoring may also be a powerful tool addressing the issue of responsiveness to intervention (RTI). CBM not only provides teachers and parents technically adequate assessment data, it also has produced significant results on the performance and motivation of students with behavioral difficulties (Benner, 2005).

As the learning characteristics of children with many types of learning disabilities have been examined, the understanding of how these children learn has lead to the development of more sophisticated instructional interventions. Researchers have observed that students with learning disabilities were, typically, unaware of the tricks of the trade and that proficient learners use problem solving strategies to organize their thoughts or plan an approach to solve complex problems. Building upon these and other studies, as well as on theoretical models, special education researchers have begun to develop and authenticate the use of explicit instructional approaches that teach such strategies to students with disabilities (Evidence Based Instruction, n.d.).

Other research has portrayed a major understanding problem of many students with disabilities and helped provide direction for instructional interventions. When asked to retell or summarize stories, many students with disabilities often added seemingly irrelevant elements. It was found that the elements were based upon their personal feelings and their experiences, rather than being derived from the text. These individual experiences and associations tended to override information presented in the book they were reading. An important objective of instruction is to show students how the academic material studied is related to their lives or the lives of others. When this instructional practice is utilized, retention of material is seen to go up (Evidence Based Instruction, n.d.).

Explicit teaching is an important technique in special education. It gives a clear framework for students with disabilities to use as they write or study or engage in group behaviors. These explicit structures offer a shared language that teachers and students can use as they take on in cognitive behaviors and as they work with one another. The final underlying principle is that by interest in a learning environment that is rich in clear, precise discussions of relationships, and full of a methodical use of relevant examples, students increasingly make connections on their own (Evidence Based Instruction, n.d.).

Special education resources for reading can include supplemental and complete instruction. Among the areas that should be addressed are phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, intervention and comprehension. Any program used should be able to sustain students with a wide variety of reading problems. Continued assessment of the students is intended to address the current and long-term needs. Some students may be on target, while others may need more intensive training. Looking at data is also important in determining whether the program being used is the best for the students, as well as evaluating and addressing the needs of the general education staff for additional training and additional resources in the area of reading instruction. When looking for a special education assets for reading, it is important to understand that the end goal is to help a special education student who might be struggling in the area of reading attain greater success in the classroom. In the end this leads to greater success in life. It is not enough to just teach the brain what to learn, it has to be taught how to learn. The result is a mind that is strong, active, and able to keep up, not just for now, but for a lifetime. It is important to get to the root of learning and reading problems. One must work to strengthen weak cognitive skills so that students are able to learn and think effectively (Special Education Resources for Reading, n.d.).

Grouping practices for reading instruction have a critical role in facilitating effective accomplishment of both reading instruction and inclusion of students with disabilities in general education classes. Grouping has been referred to as one of the alterable instructional factors that can powerfully influence positively or negatively the levels of individual student engagement and hence academic progress, as well as a means by which we can address diversity in classrooms. As bigger numbers of students with learning disabilities (LD) are receiving education in the general education classroom, teachers will need to consider grouping practices that are effective for meeting these students' needs as well as all other. Reading instruction is the academic area of greatest need for students with LD. Grouping practices that enhance the reading acquisition skills of students with LD need to be identified and implemented. Until lately, most teachers used homogeneous groups for reading instruction. This existing practice was criticized based on several factors. The first was that of ability grouping which lowers self-esteem and reduces motivation among poor readers. It also restricts friendship choices, and widens the gap between poor readers and good readers. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of ability grouping was the finding that students who were the poorest readers received reading instruction that was below that of higher ability counterparts in terms of instructional time; time reading, discussing, and comprehending text and appropriateness of reading materials. As a result, varied grouping practices now prevail, and substitute grouping practices such as cooperative learning and peer tutoring have been developed. As general education classrooms become more mixed, due in part to the integration of students with LD, both special and general education teachers need to have a variety of instructional techniques designed to meet the individual needs of their students (Special Education Resources for Reading, n.d.).

Scientifically-based reading research has demonstrated that children must learn phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary and text comprehension in order to read well (Best Practices in Special Education, n.d.). In a study done by Calhoon (2005), the effect of a peer-mediated instructional approach on the teaching of phonological skills and reading comprehension for middle school students with reading disabilities was looked at. All students were identified as having learning disabilities and reading at the third-grade level or below. One group was taught using a peer-mediated phonological skill program, Linguistics Skills Training (LST), and a peer-mediated reading comprehension program, Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS). The contrast group was taught in the more customary whole-class format using a widely implemented remedial reading program. The results showed significant differences between conditions, with students receiving the LST/PALS instruction outperforming the contrast group on Letter -- Word Identification, Word Attack, and Passage Comprehension using the Woodcock-Johnson Test of Achievement -- III. Furthermore, large effect sizes for growth were found on Letter -- Word Identification, Word Attack, and Passage Comprehension for the LST/PALS treatment group. There were no differences found between the conditions for reading fluency (Al Otaiba and Fuchs, 2006).

The gap between proficient and less proficient readers widens over the elementary years and remediation of reading problems becomes increasingly difficult after third grade. Moreover, the long-term negative effects of illiteracy have been well documented. Thus, it is only fitting that the prevention of reading difficulties has become a national priority. Two recent federally sponsored reviews of the literature, Preventing Reading Difficulties and the National Reading Panel Report, have documented the effectiveness of explicit and systematic early literacy interventions and have recommended providing more intensive early interventions to help all children with special needs (Al Otaiba and Fuchs, 2006).

Dual-discrepancy criterion applied to CBM is an empirically sound and feasible strategy to identify non-responders. This strategy has the advantage of explicitly taking into account learning or lack thereof a defining feature of learning disability and encouraging a critical examination of current instructional practices. As such, it could help practitioners devise interventions that boost the reading achievement of struggling readers and distinguish truly disabled children from children who have received inadequate instruction, highlighting the cognitive and language processing of the former. Dual discrepancy is also relevant to a formal diagnosis of learning disability based on a responsiveness- to-intervention definition. We recognize that, although promising, our work on the dual-discrepancy criterion is at an early stage. It remains to be seen if children identified as non-responders represent a qualitatively distinct group or, alternatively, if non-responsiveness is best conceived in terms of a continuum (Dion, Morgan, Fuchs and Fuchs, 2004).

The important role of phonological awareness in learning to read has become widely accepted. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of phonological processing skills when attempting to assist older low-progress readers to develop literacy skills. While researchers generally agree that the key variables in reading acquisition, (letter sound knowledge and phonological awareness influence a student's ability to understand and implement the alphabetic principle, it is still unresolved, however, whether or not the absence of these variables is sufficient to categorize a student as dyslexic. Furthermore it is unclear as to whether or not the research on beginning reading practices should inform the development of instructional programs for older low-progress readers. Despite a move away from traditional discrepancy criteria towards a more phonologically-based definition of reading disability, the current researchers conclude that the adoption of a non-categorical approach to reading disability is the most helpful for remediation practices for older low-progress readers. This contrasts with the current pursuit of some researchers to diagnose a set of underlying causes through the development of phonological testing batteries. It is concluded that reading disability is best understood by a continuum model, where the difficulties in reading are influenced by two major causal factors; phonological ability and quality of literacy learning environment (Pogorzelsk and Wheldall, 2005).

For many reading researchers and practitioners, the Response to Intervention (RTI) initiative is arguably a new approach for the early identification of students with reading problems. It is conceivably a new method for providing expert reading instruction and for accurately placing eligible children in special education programs. At the core of RTI in reading are the notions that struggling readers are identified early, that they are provided with well timed, intensive, expert reading instruction to enable them to catch up with their achieving peers, and that they are placed in special education services only if and when the provision of intensive and expert reading instruction has not resulted in significant advances in their reading development. Pedagogically, RTI is a tiered framework for instructional delivery, which includes increasingly intensified levels, or tiers, of high-quality instruction matched to the student's needs (Mokhtari, Porter and Edwards, 2010).

In a study done by (Vaughn, Cirino, Wanzek, Wexler, Fletcher, Denton, Barth, Romain and Francis, (2010) the effectiveness of a yearlong, researcher-provided, Tier 2 (secondary) intervention with a group of sixth-grader was examined. The intervention emphasized word recognition, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Participants scored below a proficiency level on their state accountability test and were compared to a similar group of struggling readers receiving school-provided instruction. All students received the benefits of content area teachers who participated in researcher-provided professional development designed to integrate vocabulary and comprehension practices throughout the school day (Tier 1). Students who participated in the Tier 2 intervention showed gains on measures of decoding, fluency, and comprehension, but differences relative to students in the comparison group were small (median d = +0.16). Students who received the researcher-provided intervention scored significantly higher than students who received comparison intervention on measures of word attack, spelling, the state accountability measure, passage comprehension, and phonemic decoding efficiency, although most often in particular subgroups.

Students with mild disabilities like specific learning disability, emotional or behavioral disorders often benefit from NCLB requirements when schools and states use these students' assessment data to increase students' access to the general education curriculum. Prior to NCLB, many school systems and state assessments did not routinely include students with mild disabilities. As a result, these students' exposure to the general education curriculum was usually limited. The students would not be taking the tests; they were not counted. Now, far more attention focuses on students with mild disabilities learning and achieving the general education curriculum. Now, their scores count. The students' progress and performance count even more because their assessment scores influence the scores of both states and individual schools (King-Sear and Bowman-Kruhm, 2010).

Although routinely including students with mild disabilities in assessments taken by their typical peers is a positive move, such participation must occur in a manner that provides students with challenging learning opportunities on the general education curriculum content and so that students are not left behind in accomplishing goals on their IEPs. That is, students with mild disabilities must continue to receive the specialized services stipulated on their IEPs while also participating and progressing in the general education curriculum (King-Sear and Bowman-Kruhm, 2010).

With the majority of students with learning disabilities (LD) having difficulties in reading, teachers at all grade levels need to incorporate comprehension strategies into their instruction to explicitly teach students with LD how to use the strategies to enhance their comprehension. One way for teachers to support students' comprehension of narrative text is to actively instruct them in using story grammar strategies. Story grammar provides students with a framework to help them understand narrative texts and includes common elements such as plot, character, setting, and theme (Stetter, and Hughes, 2010).

It is crucial that all teachers familiarize themselves with strategies that assist their students with LD comprehend narrative reading materials, particularly that now, more than ever, students with LD are receiving more of their instruction in the general classroom. With more students with LD receiving instruction in general education classes, it is essential that both general and special educators increase in their understanding of research-based strategies that they can utilize to improve the comprehension ability of students with LD or other reading difficulties (Stetter, and Hughes, 2010).

Reading problems of children with disabilities including children with cognitive impairment included difficulties in discriminating letters, particularly those which are liable to visual confusion; responding to all relevant components of complex stimulus arrays; acquisition of letter-sound correspondence as letters and isolated phonemes are abstract stimuli to which children with intellectual disabilities may have problems relating; understanding difference between sounds of isolated phonemes and their sound when blended in words; graphemephoneme correspondence; difficulty with generalization of acquired skills; and difficulty with communication (Rao, 2009).

While the professional literature and discourse has continually reinforced the importance of building and strengthening the reading skills of young children, it has long overlooked the importance of literacy instruction at the secondary level, particularly for adolescents who still struggle with reading. Recent initiatives aimed at improving the reading skills of the nation's youth have resulted in improvements in skills across learners in the early grades; however, the same improvements have not been realized for adolescents. According to the recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), there was no significant change in the percentage of readers considered proficient in eighth grade from 1992-2007, whereas the percentage of proficient readers in fourth grade rose significantly over the same period of time. Compounding the problem, remedial support for literacy is typically provided only at the elementary school level. Consequently, students who enter secondary school still struggling with reading tend to continue to struggle throughout their middle and high school years (Malmgren and Trezek, 2009).

Best practice dictates that the evaluation professional is fluent and literate in the two or more languages of the student being tested. The evaluation professional should also be knowledgeable of cultural and linguistic issues that can impact test results and have training on evaluation materials and practices appropriate for the CLD student. The evaluation materials should be in the language of the student and format most likely to yield accurate information.