Special Education and Teaching Commons^™

Accessibility Services Roundtable Unconference Proceedings 2016, Lacuny Accessibility Services Roundtable, Robin Brown

Events

A group of 16, mostly librarians, met in the Archives Reading Room of City College Library on Friday, June 17, 2016. The format of our meeting was an unconference, which means the conversations were driven by the concerns of the participants. I have no doubt that anyone who reads this document will come away with different impressions. The ideas that jumped out at me include learning a lot more about universal design for learning. Be aware that phones can be used in the classroom as assistive technology. Consider doing a usability study of library resources in concert with students with …

Adopting Universal Design In Libraries: Collaborating For Student Success, Stefanie Havelka, Rebecca Arzola

Publications and Research

Faculty grapple with resources such as skill (experience with accessible features and devices), time (teaching students how to navigate software and devices in the library), and expense (software, hardware, eBooks, databases). This presentation will provide an overview of accessible features in library research databases, computer technology, mobile devices, and apps. The presenters will report on their collaboration with Lehman College’s Access and Technology Center (ATC) and Student Disability Services to share how to better approach issues and challenges in order to more successfully support students’ access needs. We will also consider the following questions:

• As librarians and faculty, how can …

Cogenerative Dialogue: Developing Biology Learning Accommodations For Students With Disabilities, Edward Lehner

Publications and Research

A prominent challenge, at times under-addressed in the science education literature, is considering what types of learning accommodations science teachers should employ for students with disabilities. Outside of science education, researchers have consistently outlined how Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is one efficient means by which to engage students with disabilities in the curriculum. This paper presents the results of a research study in which teachers employed cogenerative dialogue as a learning space where UDL was used to differentiate and individualize instruction in an inclusive biology class. The data originated from a larger, ongoing, longitudinal ethnography of science learning in …

Preparing Teachers To Work With Students With Emotional Regulation Difficulties, Dana E. Gottesman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Difficulty with emotional regulation is a symptom common to many child psychological disorders and classroom-related problems. However, many children with emotional regulation difficulties do not receive adequate support in their classrooms. Although a variety of procedures have been used to help students improve their emotional regulation, there are very few studies that focus on training teachers to deliver classroom-based interventions that are designed to target a broad range of children with difficulties in emotional regulation. This current investigation measured the impact of a professional development program on emotional regulation on teachers’ responses to students with emotional regulation difficulties and their …

Lessons Learned From Lesson Study: Focusing On Differentiation For Ells And Students With Special Needs, Anne Marie Marshall, Khalilah Arrington

Publications and Research

This poster will present an overview of the lesson study process within the MATH-UP program. The poster will summarize the components of lesson study and highlight candidate learning from the process. Specifically, the lesson study selected will demonstrate evidence of candidate learning about emergent bilinguals.

Courage To Speak, Fortitude To Listen: A Model For The Study Of First-Person Ld Narratives, Charles Christian Haitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Learning disabled (LD) is both a politically and socially contentious term. In the eyes of the public, the label is synonymous with special education (SE). SE's vision of LD remains the dominant discourse of deficit-based understanding of human differences. This has resulted in its adherence to segregated services for many students that often result in additional behavior problems exacerbating their struggles to learn in school. A lack of student representation in school affairs is exemplified in the absence of LD pupils' voices in the decision-making that frames how they are viewed by others. This absence of voice also influences how …

Special Education Professional Standards: How Important Are They In The Context Of Teacher Performance Evaluation?, Sara B. Woolf

Publications and Research

Teacher performance evaluation represents a high stakes issue as evidenced by its pivotal emphasis in national and local education reform initiatives and federal policy levers. National, state, and local education leaders continue to experience unprecedented pressure to adopt standardized benchmarks to reflect and link student achievement data to formal teacher performance evaluations. No teacher performance evaluation measures have been developed for use with special education teachers or the settings in which they teach. Dedicated focus is needed to ensure that adopted evaluation measures are sensitive to the specific expertise reflected in the practices of specialty teachers and valid for use. …

Use Of An Interdependent Group Contingency To Improve Homework Completion, Homework Accuracy, And Achievement Of High School Students With Disabilities, Maria Carrino Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Homework is a frequently utilized teaching strategy in elementary and secondary classrooms. The completion of homework has been shown to have a strong positive effect on students' academic achievement across content and ability levels. Moreover, research suggests a stronger positive relationship between homework and achievement at the upper grade levels. Numerous interventions, both at home and at school, have been employed to increase students' level of homework completion and/or accuracy. The present investigation employed a single-subject reversal design to examine the effectiveness of an interdependent group contingency, with randomized components, on the homework completion, homework accuracy, and the academic achievement …

Suggested Practices For Teaching Developmental Writing To Postsecondary Students Who Are Deaf, Sue Livingston

Publications and Research

A LaGuardia Community College course in developmental writing for deaf students features small class size and teachers fluent in American Sign Language. Teaching practices include reading of model essays on topics of interest to deaf students, peer feedback on the first two drafts of writing assignments, and student "reading aloud" of essays in English-like sign language.

Effectiveness Compared: Asl Interpretation Vs. Transliteration, Sue Livingston, Bonnie Singer, Theodore Abramson

Publications and Research

Two kinds of interpretation are currently used to make the spoken language accessible to deaf students in regular college programs; namely, ASL Interpretation and Transliteration. To test the effectiveness of each kind, 43 students from several colleges of the City University of New York were divided into two groups by their preference for one or the other kind, and the groups divided according to level of education. Matched groups then received a narrative presentation and a lecture presentation, interpreted either one way or the other by experienced certified interpreters, and then answered questions on the material so received. The results …

How To Read Aloud To Deaf Children And Young Adults, Sue Livingston, Maureen Collins

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Comprehension Strategies Of Two Deaf Readers, Sue Livingston

Publications and Research

Strategies for reading comprehension used by two deaf college students as they discussed assigned readings with their teacher and classmates are here shown in examples categorized, tallied, and compared. Both were active users of strategies, and their pattern of strategy use was similar: interpreting, questioning, paraphrasing, and integrating were the strategies most used. The student reader who preferred expressing and receiving English-like sign manifested a higher proportion of inaccurate interpretations and paraphrases than did the student reader who preferred receiving and expressing American Sign Language (ASL), primarily because the former was unfamiliar with written linguistic cues and conventions of narrative …

Revision Strategies Of Deaf Student Writers, Sue Livingston

Publications and Research

Deaf high school students at different schools shared second drafts of their own narratives via an electronic bulletin board after conferencing with their respective teachers. This article characterizes the kinds of questions teachers asked during the conferences and the kinds of revisions the students made between first and second drafts. Results indicate that teachers most often ask questions that require student to provide more information; yet these questions do not affect revision as much as questions which require students to rephrase specific language. Students typically either added or substituted words or phrases that showed both similarities to and differences from …

Deaf Students Responding To The Writing Of Their Peers, Sue Livingston

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

An Alternative View Of Education For Deaf Children: Part Ii, Lil Brannon, Sue Livingston

Publications and Research

How might deaf children acquire one of the primary goals of education literacy in English? This article suggests that literacy in English as well as knowledge of the English language can be acquired concomitantly through developmental reading and writing activities that reflect principles of first language acquisition if students bring to these activities relatable experiences which they have already linguistically represented. Such activities engage students in reading and writing where content and context support them in their attempts to actively understand and convey meaning in English. The end product of, rather than the prerequisite for, this meaningful reading and writing …

An Alternative View Of Education For Deaf Children: Part I, Sue Livingston

Publications and Research

Quigley and Kretschmer (1982) asserted that the primary goal of education for deaf children should be literacy in English. This article presents an alternative view that there be two primary goals: (a) thinking and learning through the development of meaning-making and meaning-sharing capacities and (b) the acquisition of literacy in English. In this article, the first of these goals is viewed as the more fundamental since it facilitates the acquisition of knowledge while it simultaneously serves as the prerequisite for the acquisition of literacy in English. Because neither direct language instruction nor the exclusive use of English in sign will …

Levels Of Development In The Language Of Deaf Children: Asl Grammatical Processes, Signed English Structures, Semantic Features, Sue Livingston

Publications and Research

This study describes the spontaneous sign language of six deaf children (6 to 16 years old) of hearing parents, who were exposed to Signed English when after the age of six they first attended a school for the deaf. Samples of their language taken at three times over a 15-month period were searched for processes and structures representative or not representative of Signed English. The nature of their developing semantics was described as the systematic acquisition of features of meaning in signs from selected lexical categories (kinship terms, negation, time expression, wh-questions, descriptive terms, and prepositions/conjunctions).

Processes not representative of …