The purpose of this single case design study was to examine the efficacy of using double-bubble Thinking Maps to improve the reading comprehension of middle school Spanish-English bilingual middle school students with learning disabilities. Participants included three female Spanish-English bilingual middle school students with learning…

The expectation that students with specific learning disabilities attain proficiency levels commensurate with their nondisabled peers is well-established in academic standards. This requires knowledge and regulation of cognition. Thus, it is critical that their teachers deliberately use metacognition in reading instruction. The problem addressed…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how elementary school administrators and teachers comprehend, evaluate, and create instructional practices for students with learning disabilities in upper grades (3rd through 5th) in central Arizona. The theoretical foundation for this study included the inclusion model and the…

The purpose of this article is to describe preliminary psychometric characteristics of a student self-report measure of self-determination, the "Self-Determination Inventory: Student Report" version (SDI-SR), designed for youth with and without disabilities. We administered the draft assessment to 311 youth and examined item functioning…

Purpose: Even without explicit instruction, learners are able to extract information about the form of a language simply by attending to input that reflects the underlying grammar. In this study, the authors explored the role of variability in this learning by asking whether varying the number of unique exemplars heard by the learner affects…

We examined instructional processes in classrooms where students with and without disabilities received mathematics instruction to understand the relationship among key instructional process variables and achievement as measured by interim and end-of-year summative assessments. Teachers (N = 78) completed instructional logs daily and administered…

Considerable government-funded efforts in school districts to train veteran teachers in the science of reading have been formed in response to the continuing difficulties and failure of nearly 40 percent of all American children (Walsh, Glaser, & Wilcox, 2006). A high percentage of the population of poor readers in this country is comprised of…

The authors of this current study compared the memory performance of adolescent students with specific reading disabilities (RD) with that of typical adolescent readers on a newly developed verbal learning test, the "Bergen-Tucson Verbal Learning Test" (BTVLT). This multiple trial test was designed to measure memory acquisition,…

The author reports on few schools that offer extra services to those with learning disabilities. Although a growing number of children are being diagnosed with mental and emotional disorders that prevent them from succeeding in college, such as autism, ADD and ADHD, few colleges have created programs that provide them the help they need to make it…

This article examines how Arizona's teachers of English learners negotiate between restrictive language policies and complex teaching conditions. This case study explores how middle school teachers in an urban school district make sense of the 4-hour English language development block, Arizona's recent English-only policy. Findings indicate that…

The disproportionate representation of culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education has been a persistent problem in education for more than four decades. The core issue concerns the possibility that some students may be misidentified, thereby receiving inappropriate educational services and being unnecessarily placed…

Response to intervention (RTI) can be both a system for providing early interventions to struggling students and a special education diagnostic tool for evaluating and identifying students with specific learning disabilities. Contributing to the very limited literature on state-level approaches, this report describes how nine states define and…

Interviews with 30 female juvenile offenders were conducted to (1) describe their educational and criminal backgrounds and (2) describe a subgroup of learning handicapped juvenile female offenders. Nearly one third had received special education services prior to their incarceration with additional offenders diagnosed as handicapped upon entry…

A study involving 1,337 students in Arizona was conducted to compare the classification of learning disabilities across several school districts, utilizing the then-proposed Bureau of Education for the Handicapped (BEH) formula. Three types of problems were apparent: the basic concept of learning disability varied across districts; the areas of…

This book presents a human development model for understanding and treating age related deficits that seem to be characteristic of individuals with learning disabilities. It is the culmination of years of clinical experience, qualitative research, and scholarship in the search for a framework that would be useful for the treatment of learning…