Zirkel, P. A. (2012). The legal dimension of RTI—Confusion confirmed: A response to Walker and Daves. Learning Disability Quarterly, 35(2), 72-75. DOI: 10.1177/0731948711433092.

This study explored children’s secure attachment with both parents versus one parent, as well as the unique role of children’s patterns of close relationships with father and mother, for a deeper understanding of maladjustment problems among children with learning disabilities (LD). Specifically, this study identified subgroups of children with different individual profiles and examined whether these profiles associated differently with children’s self-rated loneliness, sense of coherence, hope, and effort, and with parent-rated externalizing/internalizing child behavior problems. Participants were 205 children (8–12 years of age), 107 with LD and 98 with typical development. Preliminary analyses indicated significant group differences on all but one of the children’s measures. Results from using k-means clustering methods indicated four distinct clusters. Scheffé procedure validated the clusters, revealing significant intercluster differences on all but one of the children’s socioemotional measures. Discussion focused on understanding different parent–child relationship patterns among these subgroups of school-age children with and without LD.

Past research has failed to recognize motivation for its potential to produce instructional gains, especially for students with reading disabilities/difficulties (RD). To this purpose, a combined motivational intervention was administered to 80 second-grade through fifth-grade students in a randomized pretest–posttest control group design with three population groups and two conditions. The intervention condition described a positive label (e.g., “clever”) associated with specific reading behavior (e.g., answers questions) accompanied by a challenge to perform better than before and better than another (intrinsic and extrinsic goals). While controlling for initial reading differences, the intervention improved the fluency and comprehension for the RD group, with and without attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), relative to the no disability (ND) group, even though the ND group also made gains. These findings documented a first-tier empirically based intervention with practical applications for elementary students with RD and their peers, although gains in reading for the ADHD group without RD were not significant.

Professional confusion, as well as case law confusion, exists concerning the fidelity and integrity of response to intervention (RTI) as a defensible procedure for identifying children as having a specific learning disability (SLD) under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Division is generated because of conflicting mandates specified in IDEA when compared to mandates in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This article is submitted to address (a) concerns about the misuse of RTI in identifying students with SLD and (b) how schools face the challenges of identifying students with learning disabilities, providing appropriate services within the least restricted environment while attempting to meet the requirements found in NCLB that all children will learn on grade level and be assessed accordingly.

Students with disabilities are frequently granted accommodations for high-stakes standardized tests to provide them an opportunity to demonstrate their academic knowledge without interference from their disability. One type of possible accommodation, test response format, concerns whether students respond in multiple-choice or constructed-response format. An experimental study was conducted to assess the performance differences of third-grade students with mathematics difficulty on a test of mathematics problem solving as a function of response format. Students responding in the multiple-choice format had a significant advantage over students answering in the constructed-response format.

The intent of this volume was to address the following questions: What is considered acceptable knowledge about disabilities? Who decides? Where does knowledge come from? Who uses it and for what purposes? Who benefits? In their article, Artiles et al. (this issue) focus explicitly on the issue of culture and how it has served to impact the field of special education, both in general and specifically in the area of scholarship and research in disabilities. The article notes that issues have traditionally received minimal treatment, including in the LD Initiative, which attempted to synthesize knowledge (Bradley & Danielson, 2004) in the area of disabilities. Artiles et al. also note how narrowly culture as a construct has been conceptualized. The authors consider three aspects of this problem within the field of disabilities scholarship and practice: the ways that factors have been considered in theories of and development within the field, the practices that surround the use of research knowledge in practice, and the practices that are embedded in decisions about what should be sanctioned as acceptable knowledge production. The Need for More Expansive Frameworks One of the main arguments of the article is a call for a broader and more nuanced view of culture, a cultural theory of learning that allows for an analytical focus larger than the individual in isolation. In this proposal, the authors point to the contributions that research in informal might make to such a development. In addition, they consider work from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including social neuroscience psychology, that have begun to tackle these issues with more expansive frameworks. What does this mean for theory related to disabilities and special education in general? Certainly it would be ideal were we to have at our disposal frameworks that integrate attention to biological, cultural, and cognitive frameworks, and that place them in the historical, institutional, and ecological dimensions of human activity. The truth is that currently we do not. As a member of the National Research Council's Committee on Minority Representation in Special Education (National Research Council, 2002), I, like other members of the team, struggled to come up with the comprehensive framework that might help change the longstanding and exclusive focus on individual deficits that had characterized much of special education policy and practice. The compromise was to embrace the now popular Response to Intervention (RtI) approach, thus broadening the unit of analysis beyond the individual student and acknowledging that disability is as much a function of the individual as it is of the social context. Yet, this approach assumed that valid, research-based interventions were available for all populations, which may not be the case, and as Artiles et al. note, the promise seems to have exceeded the reality because of the narrow ways in which RtI is sometimes implemented. Moreover, a recent expert-consensus white paper has argued that this approach is an inadequate way of identifying specific disabilities (Hale et al., 2010). Interestingly, the psychometric approach recommended does not consider the historical difficulties that have been encountered with groups of students for whom overrepresentation has been a longstanding problem. Cultural Considerations An interesting paradox related to the uneasy relationship between the constructs of disabilities and culture is that the very definition of disabilities excludes culture as a causal factor. At the same time, however, the definitional issues related to disabilities are most problematic with respect to specific racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups where issues are often the focus. This controversy is most notably evident in the relatively long history of research on the issue of overrepresentation of specific subgroups of the population, specifically Latino and African American students, and especially in the judgmental categories, or those cases in which physical or intellectual impairments are not immediately or easily distinghished. …

This study examined the impact of contextual and individual factors on the implementation of professional development (PD) content in the area of word study and fluency by three upper-elementary special education teachers. The PD effort included an initial PD institute, monthly cohort meetings, an online community forum, coaching, and opportunities for self-reflection. Interview data, observation field notes and ratings, meeting transcripts, and knowledge surveys were collected and analyzed. Using case study and cross-case analysis, three interrelated themes emerged that differentiated participating teachers' ability to effectively integrate the PD content into their classroom instruction: (a) content reading knowledge and pedagogical skills, (b) motivation to participate in the PD and to change instructional practice, and (c) individual teachers' willingness to enhance or modify the curriculum used in the classroom. Information related to these themes and their interrelationships is reported along with the implications for future research and practice in PD for special educators.

Informed instruction that adjusts content, materials, or intensity to student needs is critical for students with learning disabilities. Informed literacy instruction requires teachers to have thorough knowledge of literacy-related content, which includes phonemes, syllables, and morphemes. The current study investigated whether teachers who possess this knowledge are better able to identify student needs and appropriate instructional spelling activities than teachers who do not possess this knowledge. In Study 1, 36 preservice teachers and 38 inservice teachers completed measures to evaluate their literacy-related content knowledge and ability to identify appropriate spelling activities. Overall, the inservice teachers demonstrated greater knowledge and were better able to identify appropriate instructional activities than the preservice teachers. In Study 2, the knowledge of 196 inservice teachers completing varying numbers of hours of professional development was analyzed to determine the effects of professional development on literacy-related content knowledge and ability to identify appropriate activities. Generally, greater teacher knowledge and identification of appropiate activities were related to the number of hours of professional development completed.

While today's teachers use a variety of teaching methods in middle-school science classes, lectures and note-taking still comprise a major portion of students' class time. To be successful in these classes, middle-school students need effective listening and note-taking skills. Students with learning disabilities (LD) are poor note-takers, which negatively impacts their academic performance. This investigation sought to examine the effects of strategic note-taking on the recall and comprehension of middle-school students with LD. Forty students with LD were randomly assigned to either an experimental or a control group. Using strategic note-taking, students in the experimental group were taught to record notes independently while viewing a videotaped science lecture. Students who were taught strategic note-taking scored significantly higher on measures of immediate free recall, long-term free recall, comprehension, and number of lecture points and words recorded in their notes than students in a control group who used conventional note-taking. The limitations of the research and implications of this technique for classroom application are discussed.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the presence of teacher biases with regard to identification of students with learning disabilities (LD). Factors related to teachers' gender, age, and experience, along with children's gender, were investigated. Results suggested that teacher gender is associated with biases with regard to identification of learning disabilities by a factor of 2:1. In other words, every child who is rated by female teachers as having an LD (who actually has LD) corresponds two children when rated by male teachers. Students' gender, on the other hand, did not differentially predict identification rates. Furthermore, teacher age and experience did not contribute significantly to student identification rates. The findings are discussed with regard to policy mandates and classification schemes.