Special Education and Teaching Commons^™

Ipads For Students With Asd: Comparing Delivery Modes For Visual Activity Schedules, Jillian Gourwitz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Visual Activity Schedules (VAS) are tools that present an abstract concept, such as time, in a more concrete and manageable form. VAS allow students to anticipate upcoming events and activities, develop an understanding of time, and facilitate the ability to predict change. Prior investigations have used VAS to increase on-task behavior while enhancing the student's ability to independently make transitions from one activity to another and are particularly appropriate as they capitalize on the visual strengths exhibited by many students with autism. Mobile devices such as the iPad are becoming a tool for teaching students with disabilities, and research is …

Self-Evaluation With And Without External Feedback To Increase Room Cleaning Skills In Students With Mild Intellectual Disabilities Or Behavior Disorders, Allison Smith Varisco

Theses and Dissertations--Early Childhood, Special Education, and Counselor Education

As students with disabilities age out of school-age resources, the need for self-evaluative skills in work tasks becomes more important. This study compared self-evaluation with reinforcement and self-evaluation with reinforcement plus external evaluation when completing room cleaning skills. The younger students did not demonstrate the ability to self-evaluate without external evaluation. Both conditions were effective when evaluating the older group of students. The author proposes additional research in looking at self-evaluative skills for specific age groups and conditions.

The Cumulative Effect Of Hyperactivity And Peer Relationships On Reading Comprehension, Kaprea F. Johnson

Counseling & Human Services Faculty Publications

The impact of hyperactivity and peer relationships on academic achievement has long been highlighted in the professional literature. This study highlights how much variation in reading comprehension scores, an indicator of academic achievement, are accounted for by hyperactivity, conduct problems, and peer problems. The participants included 129 students in first through sixth grade in an urban school district in the Northeast. A multiple regression analysis was used to investigate the unique contributions of hyperactivity, peer relationships, and conduct problems on reading comprehension. Results indicated that increasing levels of peer problems were associated with decreasing reading comprehension scores.

"People Are People": Benefits Of Inclusive Service, Sarah Mueller

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

College institutions often emphasize the importance of service learning for their students. After research revealed a lack of volunteer opportunities for college aged individuals with disabilities, a pilot program was developed to examine the benefits of service for this population, as well as their peers without disabilities. The project involved college undergraduates and young adults with an intellectual or developmental disability. After a weeklong service trip together, benefits were discussed and evaluated. Benefits to the participants with disabilities included pride, skill development and generalization, empowerment, and increases in social interaction. Benefits to the participants without disabilities included positive attitude change, …

Speech-Language Services For Bilingual Students: Relevant Issues And Concerns, Mary Scott

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are ethically responsible for providing the best possible therapy to their clients. As the number of non-English-speaking homes is increasing in the United States, so is the need for SLPs with a thorough understanding of how to appropriately service multilingual clients,. This project is intended as a primer for speech-language pathologists facing the complexity of servicing linguistically--and culturally-diverse populations. It includes an in-depth analysis of language development in bilingual children compared to monolingual children, types of assessments used to differentiate between a language difference and a language disorder, and cultural factors that should be considered when providing …

Virtual Coaching In Guatemala: Can It Be Effective For Changing Targeted Teacher Behaviors?, Ruby Owiny

Theses and Dissertations--Early Childhood, Special Education, and Counselor Education

The education system in Guatemala struggles to meet the needs of students with disabilities. There are often not enough trained special educators to meet the demand. In addition, general educators are often not trained to adequately meet diverse needs in their classrooms. Thus, schools are often unable to fully meet the needs of students with disabilities. This study sought to identify a method by which teachers could be virtually trained on a teacher behavior (i.e., specific praise) that could help meet diverse student needs. A multiple probe design across participants was used to determine if virtual training could be effective …

Teaching Core Content Vocabulary With And Without Pictures To Students With Moderate And Severe Disabilities, Barbara A. Roland

Theses and Dissertations--Early Childhood, Special Education, and Counselor Education

This study provided an examination of a comparison of the acquisition of skills between two different instructional conditions in teaching reading of vocabulary to high school students with moderate and severe disabilities. A comparison of the acquisition between the use of words with pictures and words alone was completed. An adapted alternating treatment design replicated across 4 participants was used to evaluate the differences in efficiency and effectiveness between the two instructional strategies (words with pictures and words alone). Results indicate both strategies were effective.

Creating Meaningful, Community-Based Social Networks, Cynthia R. Chambers

ETSU Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of A Training Package On The Use Of Inclusive Teacher Behaviors In A Sunday School Class, Melanie A. Baggerman

Theses and Dissertations--Early Childhood, Special Education, and Counselor Education

The purpose of the study was to provide training and follow-up sessions for Sunday school teachers to increase the use of inclusive teacher behaviors (opportunities to respond, behavior specific praise, and opportunities to participate) for educating a child with moderate to severe disability. A multiple baseline across behaviors design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of training and follow-up sessions for a Sunday school teacher that had a child with moderate to severe disability in her class. The results showed training and follow-up were effective in teaching inclusive teacher behaviors within a church setting.

General And Special Education Teachers' Perspectives Of Full Membership For Students With Disabilities, Pamela S. Morgan

Doctoral Dissertations

The idea of full membership (FM) for students with disabilities (SWD) originated with the 1975 Education for all Handicapped Children Act which required equal educational access for these students. Full membership has evolved from mainstreaming to focusing on acceptance and belonging in a school community where all stakeholders have a voice and the culture is reflective of these values and beliefs. Despite American public education policy, there appears to be minimal progress for SWD in gaining FM. This phenomenological qualitative study was conducted to gain insight into the perceptions and lived experiences of teachers. Comparing two high schools in the …

A Starfish For Teaching: A Model Of Hope For Students And Pedagogy, Virginia Heslinga

Electronic Journal for Inclusive Education

Millenniums have offered ideas about how people think, cope, adjust, and survive. Nurturing and maintaining a heart and mind to help others, to be inclusive against incredible odds and societies that act more quickly to exclude needs symbols to aid progress. Cognition, observation, hope, imagination, perception, responsibility, and self-efficacy connect well to the starfish. Students of any age need images, symbols, role models, and practice in finding ways to triumph over life experiences that cause pain and discouragement. Starfish in actual examples, metaphors, and stories aid educators in building thinking, learning, and coping skills for healthy inclusive environments.

Teachers Adapting Common Core Informational-Text Writing Instruction For Students With Mild To Moderate Disabilities, Diana Hawley

Doctoral Dissertations

With the adoption of the Common Core State Standards, students must now become skilled at using different types of writing to help them critique text and process information. They also are required to write informational text. Informational-text writing is challenging for students with mild to moderate disabilities, including students with language-learning disabilities, who often struggle with aspects of language necessary for learning to read and write. These students show striking challenges with productivity, grammatical and spelling accuracy, and sentence complexity, with differences in performance by genre (Koutsoftas & Gray, 2012; Scott & Windsor, 2000; Troia, Lin, Cohen, & Monroe, 2011). …

Teacher Training In Opportunities To Respond And Positive Feedback: Effects On Student Engagement, Yevheniy Sukovskyy

Theses and Dissertations--Early Childhood, Special Education, and Counselor Education

This study investigated the impact of a brief teacher training combined with use of a MotivAider that sought to simultaneously manipulate rate of opportunity to respond and positive feedback on students’ on-task behavior during a classroom activity. The goal of the training was to increase the percentage of time the learner stayed on task during the class activity. Three elementary teacher-student dyads took part in this study. An A-B-A-B withdrawal design was employed to evaluate the function of relation between independent and dependent variables. Results showed low effectiveness of brief training and MotivAider as a strategy of increasing teachers providing …

Comprehensive Multi-Disciplinary Assessment Protocol For Autism Spectrum Disorder, Janet L. Dodd, Lauren K. Franke, Jeanette K. Grzesik, Jenna Stoskopf

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Legal mandates established under IDEA specify a student must be assessed in all areas of suspected disability. Never is this task more overwhelming than its application to the assessment of a student suspected of a diagnosis of autism. The assessment of an individual suspected of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis is a complex task and is dependent on the integration of information gleaned from assessments conducted by an array of professionals, each with their own distinct area of expertise. The purpose of this article is to introduce the Comprehensive Multidisciplinary Assessment Protocols-Autism Spectrum Disorder, referred to as the CMAPs, …

How A Teacher Educator In The Field Of The Education Of Hearing-Impaired Children Provides Feedback To A Student Teacher, Hasan Gürgür

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

The aim of this article was to investigate how an experienced teacher educator (TE) specialized in the education of hearing-impaired children provides feedback to a student teacher regarding a planned, one-to-one conversation activity. This case study was conducted at Anadolu University, Education and Research Center for Hearing-Impaired Children with the participation of a TE, a student teacher, and a hearing-impaired student. Based on the study results, main themes relating to the TE’s activities before, during, and after the conversation and his feedback were identified. The study findings were discussed in light of the current literature, and various recommendations were proposed.

Supporting Narrative Retells For People With Aphasia Using Augmentative And Alternative Communication: Photographs Or Line Drawings? Text Or No Text?, Julie Griffith, Aimee R. Dietz, Kristy S.E. Weissling

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine how the interface design of an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device influences the communication behaviors of people with aphasia during a narrative retell task.

Method: A case-series design was used. Four narratives were created on an AAC device with combinations of personally relevant (PR) photographs, line drawings (LDs), and text for each participant. The narrative retells were analyzed to describe the expressive modality units (EMUs) used, trouble sources experienced, and whether trouble sources were repaired. The researchers also explored the participants’ perceived helpfulness of the interface features.

Results: The participants …

The Influence Of Audibility On Speech Recognition With Nonlinear Frequency Compression For Children And Adults With Hearing Loss, Ryan W. Mccreery, Joshua Alexander, Marc A. Brennan, Brenda Hoover, Judy Kopun, Patricia G. Stelmachowicz

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Objective—The primary goal of nonlinear frequency compression (NFC) and other frequency lowering strategies is to increase the audibility of high-frequency sounds that are not otherwise audible with conventional hearing-aid processing due to the degree of hearing loss, limited hearing aid bandwidth or a combination of both factors. The aim of the current study was to compare estimates of speech audibility processed by NFC to improvements in speech recognition for a group of children and adults with high-frequency hearing loss.

Design—Monosyllabic word recognition was measured in noise for twenty-four adults and twelve children with mild to severe sensorineural hearing loss. Stimuli …

Development Of An Instrument To Measure The Attitudes Of Christian School Leaders Towards Factors That May Influence Their Decisions To Implement Special Education Programs, Julia Elliott

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this study is to develop and field-test the School Leader's Special Education Decision-Making Scale and to determine its validity and reliability for use with Christian school leaders. This 11-item scale, derived from the literature, measures the attitudes of Christian school leaders towards decisions to implement a special education program based on four factors: shared vision, parental considerations, teacher input, and religious concerns. This study was exploratory in nature and sought to extend a previous qualitative study by determining a way to quantify six intangible factors identified in that study. Three panels of experts in the fields of …

The Perceptions Of Caucasian Female Elementary Teachers And The Overrepresentation Of African-American Males In Special Education, Thomas Seaberry

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

There is a disproportionate amount of African-American males in special education programs. Several factors have been offered by researchers as to why this phenomenon continues to be a problem throughout the county. The purpose of this study was to understand how Caucasian female teachers' perceptions of African-American male students might influence their overrepresentation in special education. This qualitative study employed an ethnographic case study method, and relied primarily on a pilot study and teacher interviews to obtain data related to this phenomenon. Using this research design, the researcher established six themes related to the research phenomenon: (1) cultural discontinuity between …

Universal Design For Learning And The Teaching Of Social Studies, Rebecca Larntz

Honors Projects

After conducting research into the idea of Universal Design for Learning, I created a rubric based on the principles of UDL. To test the rubric, a study was conducted in which participants were asked to evaluate a Stanford History Education Group lesson plan using my rubric. Before the study, the rubric was tested for ambiguities by four other respondents. The rubric was then modified based on their feedback, and then the rubric was used by 95 participants to evaluate the selected lesson plan.

Effects Of Disability Awareness Educational Programs On An Inclusive Classroom, Cecelia Williamson

Honors Projects

Students with disabilities are more often than not included in the general education classroom. This study develops and implements a Disability Awareness Program in a fourth grade classroom and through action research, determines whether the program was influential in shaping positive behaviors towards students with disabilities. The students were exposed to five disability lessons on autism, physical disabilities, dyslexia, blindness/ vision impairments and accessibility. Three lessons, beginning, middle and end, began with questionnaires on disability knowledge and moral thinking. Each lesson was partnered with open discussion. In response to the positive attitudes, the classroom environment become more inclusive of students …

Theory And Practice Of Inclusive Education In Hungary, Agnes N. Toth

Electronic Journal for Inclusive Education

Before changing the political regime, Hungary was almost exclusively affected by the Soviet and Eastern- European communist countries whose impact was profound on Hungarian education system as well. Hungary had a traditionally separated schooling system for mainstream and disabled children due to the diagnose-based model of special needs pedagogy. Vygotsky was one of the most popular scientists in Moscow who developed ‘an area of scientific scholarship devoted to problems of diagnosing, educating and rehabilitating children with physical and mental handicap (known as ‘defects’)’ (Knox 1989, as cited in Ainscow & Memmenasha 1998:16).

How To Use Play As A Teaching Tool For Children With Asd, Kathy Ralabate Doody Ph.D.

NYS Child Welfare/Child Protective Services Training Institute

No abstract provided.

Living At The Friendship House: Findings From The Transition Planning Inventory, Jane Finn, Vicki-Lynn Holmes, Rebecca Johnson

Faculty Publications

A residential initiative, named the Friendship House, was created through advocates focused on helping people with intellectual disabilities live independently in affordable and safe housing on a university campus. The Friendship House is a small residence hall where individuals with intellectual disabilities live side-by-side with similarly aged and same gendered university students. Qualitative finding as in resident reports and observational data provides support that the Friendship House experience has been successful. However, to better equip these residents with intellectual disabilities, it is important to assess the program in terms of post school transition acquisition skills. This study focuses on whether …

The Effects Of A Simultaneous Prompting Procedure To Teach Math Skills During Play Time To Young Children With Developmental Disabilities, Abby Evans Mccormick

Theses and Dissertations--Early Childhood, Special Education, and Counselor Education

This study was done to evaluate the simultaneous prompting procedure when teaching math skills during play time to young children with disabilities. The research included 5 students who participated in a special education resource classroom and general education classroom. The researcher used a design similar to a multiple probe design. The study found all participants who began intervention met criterion. The research also found students who participated in maintenance and generalization met criterion during those stages.

Including Nontargeted Information When Teaching Multiple Exemplars Of Shapes With The Constant Time Delay Procedure, Samantha D. Matthews

Theses and Dissertations--Early Childhood, Special Education, and Counselor Education

Five elementary age students with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities were taught shape identification. A multiple probe design across behaviors, replicated across participants, was used to determine the effectiveness of constant time delay to determine the effectiveness of Constant Time Delay to teach shapes. Nontarget information was included in praise statements. All students met criterion on target information of shape identification. All students increased their ability to identify shape words, spell shape words, tell the number of sides of the shapes when presented and tell the number of angles of shapes presented. Generalization occurred during daily walks through the school …

The Effects Of Embedding Formative Assessment Measures In A Problem--Based Learning Mathematics Curriculum For Middle School Students, Mark D. Butler

Theses and Dissertations--Early Childhood, Special Education, and Counselor Education

Student performance in the area of mathematics is a topic of national concern in the United States, with several reports documenting the need for effective instruction to boost student achievement. However, what type of math instruction will most effectively raise student achievement for students with disabilities (SWD) remains a matter of debate. Problem-based learning (PBL) is a promising methodology for engaging and motivating students’ learning while increasing their math skills. Enhanced Anchored Instruction (EAI) is a form of problem-based learning, rooted in a constructivist framework, which guides students through complex problems through video anchors and context rich environments that has …

Academic Or Functional Life Skills? Using Behaviors Associated With Happiness To Guide Instruction For Students With Profound/Multiple Disabilities, Jonna L. Bobzien

Communication Disorders & Special Education Faculty Publications

The field of special education has begun to concentrate its efforts on developing objectives and procedural strategies that promote a positive quality of life for students with profound multiple disabilities, while determining which educational strategies are the most appropriate. A multielement design was used to compare the effects of two educational conditions, academic skills instruction and functional life skills instruction, on the quality of life indicators of four students with profound multiple disabilities. Results indicated that all four students demonstrated a greater number of behaviors associated with happiness while receiving academic skills instruction. Implications for current educational practices are addressed …

Predictors Of School Engagement For Females With Emotional And Behavioral Disabilities, Stacey Hardin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Women in general have been historically overlooked in society and, more recently, in research females with emotional and behavioral disabilities (EBD) have been unnoticed (Rice, Merves, & Srsic, 2008). The purpose of the current study is to build a foundation of knowledge and practices for educators and researchers to better support and education this unique population of females. To better understand females with EBD, the researcher imposed a three-phase study, situated in two frameworks-the Culturally Responsive Theory Framework (Wlodkowski & Ginsberg, 1995) and the Participation-Identification Model (Finn, 1989), to look into the predictors of school engagement for females with EBD. …

Analysis Of Commercial Online Training Videos For Teachers Who Instruct Students With Characteristics Of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Kelly Schaffer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A deficit currently exists in teacher preparation programs for teaching students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) using evidence-based practices, specifically in the area of Applied Behavior Analysis. As communication deficits are a primary characteristic associated with the diagnosis of ASD teaching communication skills is a common educational goal for students with ASD, and this skill needs to be addressed in teacher education. Mand training is one evidence-based practice applied to teach independent requesting skills to students with ASD. In this study, four teachers serving students with characteristics of ASD in the classroom participated in a multiple-probe across-participants study evaluating the …