In an article slated to appear in Remedial and Special Education, Jeanne Wanzek and Sharon Vaughn reported that widely popular three-tiered approach to addressing did not significantly reduce the number and percentage of students identified for special education across seven elementary schools. Their study, which is limited to the response to instruction or intervention in the primary and early elementary grades and focused primarily on academic intervention, revealed no significant reduction in identification of children as having Learning Disabilities, even though this group would be the most likely to benefit from such prevention efforts. Similarly, there were no differences in the proportion of students identified for special education according to ethnic background.
Continue reading ‘Does RtI reduce numbers of children in special education?’
Monthly Archive for February, 2010
A research team in Professor Leo Blomert’s lab at Maastricht University in the Netherlands reported that brain scans of children with and without dyslexia reveal differences when associating letters with sounds. Vera Blau and colleagues studied 34 9-½-year-old children, 18 of whom were identified as having dyslexia. While the children completed tasks under four different conditions (letters presented only visually; speech sounds presented alone; multi-sensory matching letter–sound pairs; and multi-sensory not-matching letter–sound pairs), the researchers obtained scans of brain activity. They found that in the brains of children with dyslexia there were weaker effects when letters and sounds matched than in the brains of children without dyslexia; these effects appeared most clearly in certain areas of the brain related to language function. In addition, the dyslexic readers’ brains showed weaker activation when speech sounds were the only stimulus (i.e., without accompanying letters).
Continue reading ‘Letter-sound correspondences: New scanning data’
On 5 February 1946, Kenneth A. Kavale was born in Brooklyn (NY, US). After graduating from college, Ken taught for a few years and then began graduate studies. In the 30+ years after he completed graduate work, he became one of the foremost contributors to the contemporary understanding of Learning Disabilities. As a journal editor, speaker, book author, and researcher, he assembled a remarkable record for scholarship. As an advocate, he encourage educators to think carefully about their words and actions. As a pal, he made lots of us laugh. Ken died in 13 December 2008. The phenomenon of Learning Disabilities is better understood because of the work he did.
Read the notice of Professor Kavale’s death on SpedPro.
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