Teaching Language Arts, Math, & Science to Students With Significant Cognitive Disabilities - Softcover

Diane M. Browder, Ph.D., is Snyder Distinguished Professor and doctoral coordinator of Special Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Dr. Browder has more than 2 decades of experience with research and writing on assessment and instruction of students with severe disabilities. Recently, she has focused on alternate assessment and linking assessment and instruction to the general curriculum. She is Principal Investigator for an Institute of Education Sciences—funded center with a focus on teaching students with moderate and severe disabilities to read. She is a partner in the National Center on Alternate Assessment and Principal Investigator for Office of Special Education Programs—funded projects on access to the general curriculum.

Dr. Spooner is Professor of Special Education, Coordinator of the Adapted Curriculum (Severe Disabilities) Program, and Principal Investigator on a personnel preparation project involving distance delivery technologies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Dr. Spooner has more than 2 decades of experience with research and writing instructional practices for students with severe disabilities. He is co-editor for Teacher Education and Special Education and serves as an associate editor for Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities. He was a co-editor for TEACHING Exceptional Children and an associate editor for Teacher Education and Special Education. Recently, he has focused on alternate assessment and linking assessment and instruction to the general curriculum and serves as a Senior Research Associate for an Institute of Education Sciences—funded center with a focus on teaching students with moderate and severe disabilities to read.

Copyright © 2005 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

When Karla began first grade, she had no academic individualized education program (IEP) objectives. Instead, her previous IEP team had focused on her need to acquire a system of communication (she was nonverbal), to become consistent in toilet training, to learn to feed herself, and several other important life skill goals. Her teacher, Ms. Ramirez, was convinced that all students should have the opportunity to gain literacy skills. She began with Karla's interest in Disney movies. She found a book of stories based on these movies and began to read it with Karla. Karla showed keen interest in the stories by laughing, clapping, and pointing to the pictures. Ms. Ramirez then developed a picture communication board for the main characters of the story (e.g., Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Seth, Andy). As she read the story, she had Karla point to the picture on her communication board as well as on the page in the book. Next, she decided to ask Karla comprehension questions after reading the story. "Who was Andy's first favorite toy?" Karla pointed to Woody. She then asked, "When did Buzz Lightyear arrive?" Excitedly, Karla began to blow on the picture of the birthday cake as if blowing out the candles. "Yes!" Ms. Ramirez replied. "Buzz Lightyear was Andy's birthday present." In just a few months, Karla had begun to use picture/word symbols to show her understanding of a story. Her mother was delighted when the IEP team met again to discuss how to teach Karla to read.1

Often when students such as Karla, who is nonverbal and has many life skill needs, begin to show the ability to learn symbols, the instructional approach is to teach sight words that relate to activities of daily living. These sight words can be an important tool for students, allowing them to become more independent in their home, job, and community environments. Unfortunately, sight-word instruction is sometimes the only reading instruction students with significant cognitive disabilities receive. Like all first graders, Karla needs the opportunity to gain broad literacy skills and to have the opportunity to experience the joy of reading. Older students also can benefit from being exposed to the literature that enriches our culture, such as poetry, plays, short stories, and nonfiction. This chapter provides guidelines for teaching sight words that are useful to daily living, but also provides a broader approach to literacy that can be used to help students participate in diverse reading activities.

Before describing the specific guidelines for promoting literacy for students such as Karla, it is important to consider what educators know about how children learn to read. The National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000), in response to a charge from Congress to assess the status of research-based knowledge in teaching children to read, identified five components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Although the NRP's findings were the source of some debate (Allington, 2002; Shanahan, 2003), most experts would agree that these focal areas are all important elements in learning to read. How these elements are best taught and learned also has been the source of many debates. Multiple learning models have been outlined to explain how children learn to read (Ruddell, Ruddell, & Singer, 1994). Pearson and Stephens (1994) presented a history of more than 30 years of research in literacy, discussing the shifting focal points and beliefs about how best to teach and learn reading. They define reading as ". . . a complex, orchestrated, constructive process through which individuals make meaning" (p. 35). Amid this complexity, there are linguistic, cognitive, social, and political elements that come into play, causing much debate about how children learn to read.

In this sometimes confusing environment, epitomized by the "great debate" — pitting teaching phonics against meaning-based methodology — practitioners struggle to make decisions about best practices. There is, however, some general agreement about models of learning to read that have been consistently supported by research over the years. For instance, Adams (1990) summarized consistent research documenting that phonics instruction can be integrated easily into more holistic methodologies to foster skilled reading. A more detailed model of the stages of learning to read was proposed by Chall (1996). This model, which outlines developmental reading stages for preschool through adult readers, provides a good background for a general understanding of how reading ability might be developed. Basically, Chall states that there are six stages along a developmental continuum (Heilman, Blair, & Rupley, 2002). According to Chall, stages can overlap and are not fixed by grade level (e.g., a student could be at Phase 0 yet be in high school), although they can be seen as representative of abilities typically manifested within a particular age-level range. Therefore, the age guidelines presented in Table 4.1 are typical indicators rather than strict levels of the development of reading.

Emergent literacy, then, can be defined in broadest terms as the process of becoming literate, beginning at birth and developing throughout a lifetime. How this ability develops and how quickly each reader progresses through each developmental stage can vary considerably. However, because these broad phases are not very helpful in terms of how to best foster this skill in learners, a more focused definition is still needed.

Sulzby and Barnhart (1992) developed a more functional definition of emergent literacy. They stated that emergent literacy involves the reading and writing behaviors of children that precede and then develop into conventional literacy. They agree with Chall that this process is developmental and can be applied to all children. However, the success of development for any one child is greatly influenced by literacy events in their lives. For instance, some children come to school already knowing how to read. They have experienced rich literacy activities before entering school, provided by parents and other adults who have served as appropriate role models of literate adults. These children are actively involved in reading signs and symbols in grocery stores, on streets, and in the surrounding community. They are actively engaged in art and play activities where they use early forms of writing to label drawings and pictures. They have "read" many books with others, often mimicking adult models, and know the conventions of print — how to hold a book, how to differentiate words from pictures, what terms such as page and word mean. Other children, however, come from settings where there are few such experiences, and they generally experience more difficulties and delays in learning to read. In fact, a national panel of experts serving on a presidential commission to study reading research in the 1980s (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985) determined that one of the biggest influences on whether a child will become a successful reader was whether they had been consistently read to before entering school.

Koppenhaver (1993) noted that students with disabilities often have had fewer opportunities to engage in literacy activities. Sometimes children with physical, cognitive, and sensory challenges have not had these early literacy experiences because of both the challenge of making materials accessible and prior low expectations about students with significant cognitive disabilities learning to read. Sometimes they have had these experiences in early childhood programs but are then shifted into a nonacademic...