ARTICLE REVIEW

3 Article Review: Teaching Students with Special Needs



Article Reviews: Teaching Students with Special Needs

Artilce 1:

“The Supporting Effective Teaching (SET) project: The relationship of inclusive teaching practices to teachers' beliefs about disability and ability, and about their roles as teachers”.

Introduction

This article is written by Anne Jordana, Christine Glenna, and Donna McGhie-Richmondb.

In this article the authors claim that inclusive education is a far-reaching notion that concerns all students. The authors propose that inclusion focuses on the transformation of school cultures to 1) increase access (or presence) of all students (not only marginalized and vulnerable groups), 2) enhance the school personnel's and students' acceptance of all students, 3) maximize students' participation in various domains of activity, and 4) increase the achievement of all students.

Article Review

In this article the authors' studeied 11, 00 students in the United States. The authors found that students with disabilities who spend more time in regular classrooms had higher scores on achievement tests, were absent less, and performed closer to grade level than their peers who were withdrawn for instruction. Overall, students with disabilities performed less well on achievement tests than those without disabilities. At face value, the success of inclusive education would seem to be inevitable. However the notion of inclusion has been poorly accepted in the schools. Scruggs and Mastropieri (1996) found that two thirds of teachers favour inclusion in principle, but less than one third believes that inclusion can be successful with the resources available to them.

The one issues that discuss in the article is the inclusion initiative may potentially be in conflict with policy initiatives that aim to identify teacher effectiveness and teaching. Teachers may be faced with apparently disparate messages about inclusive education. On the one hand The authors are told that they are to meet teaching quality objectives by raising class averages in student achievement, while on the other hand told that they are to be responsible for diversifying instruction to meet a range of learner needs. It is no surprise therefore that teacher express ambivalence about including students with disabilities in their classes.

The main purpose of this article is to present the findings of the SET research program. Rather than follow a standard reporting format, a series of research questions will be addressed from the results of various studies:

1. Are teachers who are effective overall with all their students also the most effective in including students with disabilities and those at risk in their general education classrooms?

2. Do teachers differ in what they believe about disabilities and their roles with and their responsibilities for their students with disabilities?

The study showed that, first, the amount of instructional time is correlated to the time and classroom management and lesson presentation skills of the teachers, and varies considerably from one teacher to the next. Teachers conserve instructional time by establishing clear routines, well understood roles for both teacher and students, and by delivering well-designed lessons with a clear beginning, middle and end. Second, the more efficient the teacher at conserving ...