A Survey on Literacy Instruction for Students with Multiple Disabilities

Abstract

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the Individuals with Disabilities Improvement Education Act of 2004 stress the importance of giving every child access to the general education curriculum. The Reading First program, under the No Child Left Behind Act, aimed to establish evidence-based literacy instruction for all students in kindergarten through the third grade (U.S. Department of Education , 2007). Despite this aim, data from the federal quota registration that are collected annually by the American Printing House for the Blind (APH) revealed that 36% of all school-aged students who are legally blind were categorized as nonreaders (APH, 2005).Nonreaders are defined as "students [who] show no reading potential; students who do not fall into any of the above categories [visual readers, braille readers, auditory readers, and prereaders]" (APH, 2007, Reading Media section). This definition starkly implies that nonreaders lack access to literacy instruction, especially considering that the prereader category is defined to include "students [who are] working on or toward a readiness level" (APH, 2007, Reading Media section).The quota-registration data do not clearly indicate how many nonreaders have multiple disabilities; however, the literature in the field of visual impairment links the presence of additional disabilities to the illiteracy rates of students who are blind or have low vision (Mullen, 1990;Spungin, 1990;Wittenstein &

Influences on Teachers’ Decisions About Literacy for Secondary Students With Severe Disabilities

“…Previous studies in the area of literacy for students with severe disabilities have primarily focused on testing interventions (e.g., Browder et al, 2008) or examining teachers' general perceptions about literacy through surveys (Durando, 2008;Ruppar et al, 2011).…”

New Directions in Reading Instruction for Adolescents With Significant Cognitive Disabilities

“…The literature is saturated with such research and needs to be expanded. A recent survey by Durando (2008) indicates that most educators self-report they are already implementing these practices effectively. Instead of continuing to research practices already used in the field, we recommend researchers focus on additional methods of teaching reading to this population of students—outside of sight word instruction—that are more comprehensive in nature and will be beneficial in practice.…”

A special messaging technology for two persons with acquired brain injury and multiple disabilities

“…This evidence seems very encouraging, as the condition of the participants was quite serious and their motor and visual disabilities would not have allowed them an independent use of the other technologies available for communicating with distant partners [7,8,10,27,28].…”

“…The presence of those disabilities, in fact, would drastically interfere with the persons' chances of benefiting from such a technology in its standard form or simple adaptations of it [7,8,10,27]. The same disabilities would also prevent the use of telephone systems [10,14,28]. Given the difficulties in finding functional technologies for these persons, the tendency may be to provide them care and protection without pursuing opportunities of communication and interaction between them and their distant partners [2,[9][10][11][12]29].…”