Scott, Jack

One of the recent trends in special education is inclusion. A new instructional strategy, coteaching, assists teachers in meeting the demands of a diverse group of students. Coteaching involves general and special educators jointly planning, instructing, and assessing all learners in an integrated classroom. The purpose of this study was to compile descriptive research on the prevalence of coteaching in Florida and investigate the degree to which Florida's state universities are preparing preservice teachers for a coteaching instructional setting. The data was collected through surveys that were completed by university faculty and facilitators at the Florida Inclusion Network (FIN). The data were analyzed using a frequency and percentage table. As a result, coteaching was found to be quite prevalent in Florida. According to participants, preservice programs at the universities should include training for coteaching settings.

Research has shown that applied behavior analysis is an effective methodology for instruction of children with autism. Furthermore, recent research has indicated a direct correlation between autism severity level and response accuracy under different verbal discriminative stimulus conditions used in the antecedent portion of a discrete instructional trial. This study was conducted to further investigate the relationship between autism severity level and response accuracy under different verbal discriminative stimulus conditions using the Gilliam Autism Rating Scale (GARS) to measure the autism severity of four prekindergarten students who were being served in home-based applied behavior analysis programs. Response accuracy was assessed under two experimental conditions for each participant: simplified speech and typical speech, using an alternating treatments design. These results are presented and discussed in relation to improving the effectiveness of early intervention program.