Proven research based teaching methods to meet the needs of students Essay

Proven research based teaching methods to meet the needs of students with Learning Disabilities in the middle grades - Essay Example on project in Syracuse, New York, directed by William Cruickshank and his colleagues, 1961), they reflected the traditional service-delivery model of the times - the self-contained special education classroom. Until the passage in 1975 of P.L. 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA), few states recognized learning disabilities as a handicapping condition that required the provision of special education services (Baker et al., 1995). But EHA changed all that. With a mandate to serve and with federal guidelines for diagnosis, publicly funded special education programs for students with learning disabilities became commonplace; the number of students classified as learning disabled (LD) and provided with special education services in public schools rose from 797,212 in 1976-77 to 2,214,326 in 1991-92 U.S. (Department of Education, Tenth Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988) On the other hand, in an ideal world, teaching and development would be inextricably linked. As teachers observed childrens intellectual, social, and academic growth, they also would seek to foster such progress. Routine observations with respect to childrens abilities would be complemented with consideration of how instruction or the classroom environment supports learning. This activity, the close observation of learning in response to instruction, is an exercise in problem solving and constitutes an essential element of diagnostic assessment. Whether in the classroom or the clinic, the interest is not simply to categorize a child under a particular label or diagnostic scheme but also to uncover the kind of instruction and educational setting that will lead to continued development. More specifically, the teacher must construct (a) an understanding of the childs current abilities, (b) a description of the kind of instruction the child should receive to make