What is your role, as a member of the educational team, if a student brings a service animal to school? Why might such an animal be needed? This article is intended to provide the tools needed to understand the important role such an animal plays in the life of a student with a disability, using research on the subject.
Teachers devote a lot of energy to teaching students to become competent readers, which is even more challenging in the inclusive classroom where some students have reading difficulties. This article examines the efficacy of a teaching activity program designed and tested in the three tiers of the Response to Intervention (RTI) model.
“Activated Learning” (AL), also called the “EFs2theRescue Pedagogy” in Guare and Dawson’s 3rd edition of Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents, is an adaptive executive function (EF) intervention that aims to facilitate high-impact teaching and learning that is necessary for some and good for all in typical classrooms. AL is a self-regulated learning pedagogy that, among other benefits, allows teachers to support students with learning disabilities (LDs) as part of their everyday teaching. It was developed in 2014 by a special education teacher (the author) and has been championed by hundreds of educators in several school boards in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K.
One of the main reading difficulties people with LDs have is in decoding printed words. People without LDs often use a phonics approach to sound out unfamiliar words but that does not work as well for many people with LDs who have difficulty in phonological processing – that is, in hearing the different sounds in words. They may also have difficulty associating sounds with letters (Lyon, 1995). This, in turn, interferes not only with the ability to sound out unfamiliar words but it also strongly affects spelling – for how could someone spell a word accurately when they do not hear all of the sounds in the word?
Behavioural disorders, particularly those of the externalized type[1], and learning disabilities often occur together. Indeed, the comorbidity between these two types of disorders in students was identified more than 20 years ago (Hinshaw, 1992). More specifically, empirical studies have shown that 75% of students with learning disabilities also lack social skills (Lane, Gresham, & O’Shaughnessy, 2002; National Dissemination Center for Children with Disabilities, 2008).
In this article, we seek to understand the errors that students make. We offer a number of cautionary notes for creating activities for the acquisition of this mathematical concept. The errors explored in this article come out of research involving students between the ages of 9 years and 12 years, at the moment when they displayed reactions of avoidance, worry or anxiety (DeBlois and Bélanger, 2016, DeBlois, 2014).
For today’s students to participate in tomorrow’s decision-making, it is imperative that they possess the skills to be mobile and adept at reading, writing, and oral communication in science (Krajick & Sutherland, 2010; Pearson et al., 2010). Even though only some students will pursue careers in science, all will engage in reading about science during their lifetime. So, all students need to ‘read to learn’ in science!
by Michael Fairbrother and Dr. Jessica Whitley What is Self-regulation? Self-regulated learning is a process that assists students in managing their thoughts, behaviours, and emotions in order to successfully navigate their learning experiences (Zumbrunn, Tadlock, & Roberts, 2011). According to Canadian researcher, Shanker (2012), “self-regulation refers to a child’s ability to deal with stressors effectively and efficiently and then return to a baseline [...]
Supporting the learning needs of students with learning disabilities requires more than a passing understanding of memory and the architecture of the mind. By exploring Baddeley and Hitch’s (1974) model of working memory, Jeffrey MacCormack and Ian Matheson will explain how information is processed and coded through memory systems and then later retrieved from the long-term memory.
By Jeffrey MacCormack and Ian Matheson Two trains depart simultaneously from cities 120 kilometres apart. The first train is travelling at 40 kilometres per hour and the second train is traveling at 60 kilometres per hour. How many minutes until they collide? If you have had to answer a word problem like this one, you [...]
