Direct Instruction: The Effect on Special Education Students
Direct Instruction Overview
Direct instruction is an increasingly popular and supported education technique that has been utilized for several years. Direct instruction has historically been used as a method of instruction for special education students (Goral, 2001). Many educators have claimed that direct instruction has helped students regardless of their learning capability or any defined learning disabilities (Goral, 2001). Direct instruction is based on the idea that a teacher led classroom that involves active participation and well choreographed lesson plans and learning instruments is a more effective learning environment than a less involved or student led learning situation.
Kozloff (2002) a firm proponent of direct instruction suggests that it provides an effective method for instruction by helping students learn to organize and activate knowledge. Further Kozloff suggests that direct instruction shifts the emphasis of teaching to mastering and acquiring proficiency of tasks rather than focusing on deficits, which may sometimes serve as an inhibition to learning for learning disabled students. Direct instruction requires that students are given instruction that is precise and defined, and that teachers model by illustrating, not simply lecturing to children using precisely defined lesson plans and tools and accessories that help facilitate learning (Kozloff, 2002).
Direct Instruction is a highly teacher led teaching style that requires design of effective instructional intervention particularly for reading or learning disabled students (Allington, 2001). It also supports the use of instructional aids with emphasis on facilitating student achievement (Boyd-Zaharias & Pate-Bain, 1998). These aides may come in many different forms including charts, worksheets, instructional guidelines and workbooks.
Overview Research Reports
Study
The study "Direct Instruction in Math Word Problems: Students with Learning Disabilities" by Paul Sindelar and Cynthia Wilson (1991) examined elementary school mathematics curricula with an emphasis on students with learning disabilities. The intent of the study was to discern whether a direct instruction approach would help learning disabled students cope with problem solving, and suggests that other programs, particularly basal programs fail because of a "lack of adequate provision for practice and review and absence of adequate teaching strategy involving step-by-step protocols (Sindelar & Wilson, 1991).
This study involved 62 participants with learning disabilities from nine elementary schools in Florida (Sindelar & Wilson, 1991). Students selected for the study had to be labeled learning disabled, attend a special education math program, have scored a minimum of 80% on basic addition/subtraction skills and had to be identified as needing help with regard to problem solving (Sindelar & Wilson, 1991: p. 512). The test utilized for examination purposes in this study consisted of 216-word problems divided in four types including: simple action problems, classification problems, complex action problems and comparison problems (Sindelar & Wilson, 1991).
The results indicated that the direct instruction approach worked best when teaching students with learning disabilities to solve word problems related to addition and subtraction (Sindelar & Wilson, 1991). These results correlate with other studies that suggest that the direct approach results in superior performance when compared with other approaches, and suggests that it be used as the primary teaching strategy for instructing learning disabled students. The direct instruction method specifically utilized in this study used features including explicitly teaching each step of the translation process, provision for detailed correction procedures and use of scripted lessons by teachers (Sindelar & Wilson, 1991).
Study
In the article "Advanced Story Map Instruction: Effects on the Reading Comprehension of Students with Learning Disabilities" Gardill and Jitendra (1999) conduct a multiple baseline study that specifically examines direct instruction. The aim of the study is to evaluate the effectiveness of this type of instruction when used with a story map procedure to affect the reading comprehension performance of students. For purposes of this study six middle school students diagnosed with learning disabilities are examined.
The results of the study suggest that story grammar and basal comprehension performance of all students participating in the study increase with the use of direct instruction techniques. The study was conducted because learning disabled students have been identified as a population with significant problems related to reading comprehension (Gardill & Jitendra, 1999). The researchers point out that a large body of research supports direct instruction as an effective tool for teaching learning comprehension as well as general analytical skills to students with learning disabilities.
Reading comprehension is thought to be difficult for LD students because it requires that they derive meaning from printed material (Gardill & Jitendra, 1999). Participants in this study were sixth and eighth grade students, all white, all having active individualized education programs. All students were also receiving instruction in reading or language arts. Selection criteria was based on students that had been identified as having a learning...
Inclusion is thought to be a best practice. Under this philosophy most students with mild disabilities spend the greater part of their day in the general education setting with their peers. Students may be allocated an instructional assistant to help them with their work. Some students with learning disabilities often spend time in a resource room in order to receive direct instruction. The special education team may decide that this
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
special education has changed dramatically. Gone are the days of the special classroom down the hall where special education students were hidden away and kept from the general student population. Gone are the days when special education students were given comic books to read and passed because they were there. Civil rights mandates of the 1960's turned the world of special education inside out and today, four decades later,
Thus, efforts aimed at helping teachers to avoid harmful stereotyping of students often begin with activities designed to raise teachers' awareness of their unconscious biases." (1989) Cotton goes on the relate that there are specific ways in which differential expectations are communicated to students according to the work of: "Brookover, et al. (1982); Brophy (1983); Brophy and Evertson (1976); Brophy and Good (1970); Cooper and Good (1983); Cooper and
In their study, "Thinking of Inclusion for All Special Needs Students: Better Think Again," Rasch and his colleagues (1994) report that, "The political argument in favor of inclusion is based on the assumption that the civil rights of students, as outlined in the 1954 decision handed down in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down the concept of 'separate but equal,' can also be construed as applying to special
" According to Patton (1998) the overrepresentation of African-American children in special education programs that are intended for students that have serious emotional or behavioral disorders, learning disabilities, and mental disabilities has continued to be a problem even though many researchers have recognized the problems that have occurred as a result of such overrepresentation. In fact there is exhaustive amounts of literature that explains the "causal factors that range from failure
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