INTERVENTION PLAN AND REPORT

INTERVENTION PLAN AND REPORT

Introduction

For the purpose of this digest, students with learning difficulties are defined as students who have significant difficulties in acquiring literacy and numeracy skills but excluding students who have an intellectual, physical or sensory impairment or whose learning difficulty is due to social cultural or environmental factors. Thus the group of students that are the subject of this digest includes (but is not limited to) those with learning disabilities, dyslexia, Attention Deficit Disorder/ Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and language and communication difficulties. Typically these students have memory and organisation problems and have failed to make satisfactory progress with the regular classroom curriculum.

There is research consensus that:

Students with learning difficulties reveal problems in storing information in memory as well as retrieving it from memory.

Learning difficulties cluster with other difficulties such as attention-deficit disorder, conduct disorders, motivation, language and social and interpersonal difficulties.

Because of their interactive relationships, difficulties in one or more of these domains often affect the development of the others.

Although there are as many females as males showing characteristics associated with learning difficulties, boys are three to four times more likely to be identified as being learning disabled.

Students' literacy and numeracy difficulties detrimentally affect all school subjects.

Students' social skills and motivation to be involved in schooling are diminished.

Students with learning difficulties have lower academic self-concepts and show less persistence when faced with difficult tasks.

Students with learning difficulties are less efficient and effective users of learning and thinking strategies than their academically more successful peers.

Students with learning difficulties often suffer diminished self-esteem, lack intrinsic motivation and attribute academic success or failure to luck.

In addressing these particular problems, research has shown that the attitude of the regular classroom teacher plays a central role. Importantly, it has been claimed that students with learning difficulties often receive less time and more negative feedback from teachers than their more successful peers (6). Others have maintained that it is the students who are most in need of the extra help in the classroom who are least likely to receive it(7). Especially in the upper primary and secondary school, students with learning difficulties are often confronted with unplanned classroom instruction and boring and unmotivating content material that does not engage them(8,9).

Reading strategies

There is considerable agreement among researchers that students with reading difficulties are frequently unable to use strategies that will best enable them to achieve the goals of the reading task(15). For example, if students wish to monitor their own learning they may choose to summarise the text and identify the main ideas. Effective readers know what the strategies are, how to carry them out and when and where to use them. Although their academically more successful peers often develop such strategies incidentally, these strategies must be explicitly taught to many children with reading difficulties. One contentious question concerns whether reading comprehension instruction should be taught in or out of the context of regular curriculum (authentic) tasks. For students with learning difficulties, another concern is the amount of time teachers ...