Instructional practices in mainstreamed secondary classrooms

Special education teachers' perceptions of factors influencing their instructional practices

The study examined the variables associated with the effective instructional practices of teachers of students with learning disabilities. Subjects were 146 female special education teachers, working in the special education classroom. Demographic information was gathered from all participants (e.g. years of experience, collaboration in school and job satisfaction). Participants responded to a 63-item questionnaire about effective instructional practices. The questionnaire consisted of four sub-scales (i.e. planning instruction, managing instruction, delivering instruction and evaluating instruction). In general, the effectiveness of instructional practices of teachers was moderate (mean=2.08, SD=0.55). No significant correlation was found between years of experience and effective instructional practice or between collaboration and effective instructional practices. A significant correlation was, however, found between job satisfaction and effective instructional practices.

The Relative Importance of Selected Communication Skills for Adolescents’ Interactions With Their Teachers

Purpose: This study investigated the opinions of high school teachers regarding the relative importance of selected communication skills for their students’ communication with them and explored if the content areas in which the teachers taught or the amount of high school teaching experience they had were associated with their opinions.

Method: Teachers ranked 14 communication skills according to perceived order of importance for Grade 10 adolescents’ communication with them as teachers.

Results: Teachers tended to perceive skills associated with discourse management strategies as relatively more important than other skills. The two communication skills that were associated with metalinguistic/figurative language aspects of communication were ranked as least important. Inexperienced and experienced high school teachers tended to rank the importance of the communication skills similarly, as did sciences and humanities teachers, except for the communication skill of turn taking, which sciences teachers ranked higher than humanities teachers.

Clinical Implications: The results provide guidelines for developing intervention approaches that can facilitate successful communicative interactions in high school environments and target goals that teachers of adolescents with language and/or learning disabilities perceive as more important for teacher-adolescent interactions.

Predicting elementary school participation in children with disabilities

OBJECTIVE

To identify predictors of participation in school activities from two sets of functional variables using classification and regression tree analysis.

DESIGN

Relational study.

PARTICIPANTS

A nationwide sample of 341 children with various disabling conditions, including physical and cognitive/behavioral types of impairment and various severity levels. Children attended public elementary school in 40 states in the United States.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE

Overall participation in elementary school, combining children's participation in six different environments (transportation, transitions, classroom, cafeteria, bathroom, and playground), as measured by the newly developed School Function Assessment. The children were dichotomized into full (n = 117) and limited (n = 224) participation categories.

RESULTS

Two classification trees were developed identifying a small set of predictors from variables measuring performance of functional tasks and discrete activities. Final predictive models included physical and cognitive-behavioral variables, suggested important interactions among predictors, and identified meaningful cut-off points that classified the sample into the outcome categories with about 85% accuracy.

CONCLUSIONS

Limited participation was predicted by information about children's physical capabilities. Full participation was predicted by a combination of physical and cognitive-behavioral variables. Findings underscore the relative utility of functional performance compared with impairment information to predict the outcome, and suggest pathways of influence to consider in future research and intervention efforts.

Homework practices of general education teachers

The purpose of this study was to survey the homework practices of general education teachers who teach students with disabilities. A national sample of 441 elementary, middle, and senior high teachers were asked about their homework practices, including their use of adaptations for students with disabilities. The results highlight homework practices and adaptations that are used frequently and perceived by teachers as helpful for students with disabilities. Also discussed are the differences in practices and adaptations across elementary, middle, and high school teachers, as well as the instructional implications of the identified homework practices for students with disabilities and their general education teachers.