Purpose: The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K; U.S. Department of Education, 2000) includes comprehensive assessments of home, classroom, and school contexts and developmental outcomes for a nationally representative sample of more than 20,000 children who began kindergarten in 1998-1999. The purposes of this article…

This study compared oral personal and fictional narratives of diverse (African American and Caucasian) students with and without learning disabilities. Naturalistic conversation with embedded narrative prompts and supports provided the context for narrative elicitation. The participants were 82 fourth to seventh graders from urban and suburban…

This was a 12-week study that explored the effects of repeated peer readings on struggling adolescent readers. It was a quasi-experimental design with one treatment group and one control group. There were two small group English classes that were consistently using the repeated reading strategy (the treatment group) and students in the co-teach…

Colleges are seeking ways to better serve the growing population of students with learning disabilities (LD) and/or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In making decisions about how to best facilitate students' success, it is important to listen to their voices as they describe their experiences and offer unique insights. The…

This study examined the effectiveness of a classroom teacher intervention, the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI), in helping struggling readers in kindergarten and first grade. This intervention used biweekly literacy coaching in the general education classroom to help classroom teachers use diagnostic strategies with struggling readers in…

School districts are struggling with how to meet the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse exceptional (CLDE) students. Research has correlated improvement in core language learning--writing, reading decoding, reading comprehension, and listening--with the use of iPods. This dissertation therefore examines the ability of current, portable…

The Stage Life was a participatory arts programme for people attending a day services provision in Nottinghamshire. The uniqueness of this programme was that it was provided in a local disused cinema acquired by the local authority for community-based activities amongst disadvantaged groups. The Stage Life aimed to build the community arts…

Objective: Homework can have beneficial effects for students; however, it presents challenges, particularly for students with attention problems. Although effective homework interventions exist, intervention development and evaluation has been hampered by the lack of psychometrically sound measures. The primary purpose of this study was to…

Promoting self-determination has become a best practice in special education. There remains, however, a paucity of causal evidence for interventions to promote self-determination. This article presents the results of a group-randomized, modified equivalent control group design study of the efficacy of the Self-Determined Learning Model of…

This article presents 2 studies aimed at validating a measure of stress experienced by children and parents around the issue of homework, applying Benson's program of validation (Benson, 1998). Study 1 provides external validity of the measure by supporting hypothesized relations between stress around homework and students' and parents' positive…

This study considered the efficacy of a differentiated approach to vocabulary instruction for learners with word-finding difficulties (WFD) in the speech and language pathologist's room. Using a pretest-posttest design to study treatment outcomes, 10 second graders with WFD received first semantic-based vocabulary instruction (S) and then…

In this article, the authors consider the power and limitations of responsiveness-to-intervention (RTI) for reducing the need for ongoing and intensive services for the segment of the school population traditionally identified as having a learning disability in mathematics. To assess the robustness of RTI, the authors describe four studies with…

The extant literature offers little to describe the processes for screening students in adult basic education (ABE) programs for potential learning disabilities, referring adult students for diagnostic assessment, or barriers to obtaining diagnostic assessment for a learning disability. Without current documentation of a learning disability, ABE…

Klinefelter syndrome (47,XXY) was initially described in the context of its endocrinologic and physical features; however, subsequent studies have revealed specific impairments in verbal skills and social functioning. Males with sex chromosomal aneuploidies are known to have variability in their developmental profile with the majority presenting…

This article presents the author's address on the 2008 International Conference of the Council for Learning Disabilities in Kansas City, Missouri. In this keynote address, the author focuses on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), and students with specific learning disabilities (SLD), and…