Fluent production of a variety of grammatically correct sentences is essential to overall writing quality across genres. Sentence-production skills become increasingly important as students prepare to transition from the elementary grades to middle-school. Many students in the upper-elementary grades, however, struggle with sentence production…

Students with learning disabilities (LD) often face significant difficulties in reading. Research has found a variety of different evidence-based practices to support the reading development of students with LD in areas such as word work, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. However, these practices are most often intended for use in traditional…

When Henry was enrolled in a gifted program in 3rd grade, he showed many of the classic signs of giftedness, but his reading and writing skills were below grade level. An evaluation revealed that he was twice-exceptional--he was gifted and he had a learning disability. Believing that both his giftedness and his learning disability warranted…

Ensuring science for all in the classroom requires that all students are afforded ways to grasp key science and engineering practices; however, we know that the practice of "obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information" can be a challenging task for children with high incidence disabilities (NGSS Lead States 2013, p. 15).…

The ability to read greatly influences students' academic careers and their entire lives. Furthermore, those who have successfully progressed through the continuum of reading behaviors will potentially experience fewer problems when they must read to learn than students who have not mastered basic reading skills. However, students with special…

In this article, students with challenging behaviors (SWCB) in a classroom may include those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), emotional and behavioral disorders (E/BD), intellectual disabilities, learning disabilities, and those at risk of these disabilities. These students may present…

As many schools move toward a three-tier model that incorporates a Response to Intervention (RtI) service delivery model in the social, emotional, and behavioral domains, school psychologists may provide leadership. The decision-making process for filtering students through multiple tiers of support and intervention and examining change is an area…

In Canadian public primary schools, newcomer West African refugees like other ethnic immigrant students are a visible minority group, often referred as Linguistic and Culturally Different (LCD) students. In the province of British Columbia, newcomer immigrant students are subjected to a battery of tests, as soon as they enroll in the primary…

Within the Response-to-Intervention framework, students who fail to profit from high-quality general education instruction, accommodations, and supplemental instruction progress to a more intensive intervention program, sometimes referred to as "Tier III." This article describes a problem-solving approach to designing such intensive, data-based,…

Research indicates that students of all ages and demographics benefit from active learning strategies. The challenge is translating what we know into what we do. Award-winning educators Linda Schwartz Green and Diane Casale-Giannola build that bridge with more than 40 easy-to-implement strategies for today's inclusive classroom. This practical…

Since the reauthorization of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (2004), the use of Response to Intervention (RTI) in the identification of students suspected of having learning disabilities has been legitimized. Several professional organizations, including the International Reading Association (IRA), have recognized the importance of…

A fundamental assumption in the identification of specific learning disabilities (SLD) has been that the presence of a severe discrepancy between ability and academic achievement is a valid marker for the presence of a SLD. This assumption is based on the notion that discrepant low achievers constitute a unique group of children who are different…

Response to Intervention (RTI) was encoded into the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004, and is being adopted on a wide scale as an alternative approach to identification of students with learning disabilities. For RTI to be an effective mechanism for addressing disproportionate representation of culturally and…

Teaching in a regular classroom has become more complicated than ever with increased student diversity and pressure to connect learning experiences to educational standards and test preparation. Although teaching to the middle is often what occurs in traditional classrooms to meet required standards, it is neither an appropriate nor meaningful…

Chris resides with his parents and attends school in an unnamed district ("the District"). During the second half of second grade, Chris started to have problems with reading and written expression. The District evaluated Chris and did not find problems significant enough to identify him as having a learning disability. At about the same time his…