"85% of special needs students show
no academic change year to year."

Seven Suggestions for Kids who have been Left Behind (Page 1)

Some children, often identified as "special needs" require more help to learn than others. Sadly, the remediation process for these students often ends with the diagnosis and labelling. They are left to languish and fail. Quite simply, they have been written off and left behind by teachers or schools. Standardized pre-test and post-test scores indicate that 85% of special needs students show no academic change year to year. Such lack of success often pushes parents into tutoring services or into homeschooling. Here are seven suggestions from the data-based educational research that have consistently worked for us for the past 22 years to help catch these children up quickly and easily.

1.Teach Basics

These students need strong basic skills, especially in reading, math, spelling and writing. Many programs discard academic activities and reduce the curriculum to manual tasks, believing that these "special" children need a less demanding program. That is their first critical error. Don't go there.

2. Use Structured Instruction

At-risk students also need better-designed instructional sequences—ones which have clear answers and are not subject to numerous possible interpretations. Such curricula must be set out as a carefully planned series of tasks, each of which is taught until mastery. A $2.5 billion, 28-year national study comparing 16 different teaching models clearly demonstrated this point. The two most structured approaches accounted for virtually all of the gains that these hundreds of thousands of children made. These methods known as Direct Instruction, developed at University of Oregon, and Behavior Analysis, developed at Harvard University, are two of the three methods we integrated into our teaching model.

3. Measure Specific Skills Daily

These children need precise performance measurement to assist them and their teachers need to know what to do next. It helps determine when to review, practice, move on or reteach. Precision Teaching, developed at University of Kansas, provides the measurement technology component of our model.
The Sacajewea study, another long-term research project involving many thousand elementary school students over a nine year period, used Precision Teaching as a way of measuring student performances. Results showed huge gains in reading and math across 22 states from one-minute daily measures of reading and math skills. Immediate, accurate feedback and daily practice created better learning, especially for high needs learners.

home | about us | catalog | reading | math | freebies | links | homeschooling | shopping cart | webcam tutoring