Learning disabled children--Education

The teaching of writing has become a major research focus in the field of education. In general education classrooms, the teaching of writing is increasingly being taught as a process, in which students write for authentic purposes and develop a community of writers. This study was designed to investigate the effects of teaching students with learning disabilities (LD) writing using four different instructional approaches. These approaches included a process-writing approach called Writers' Workshop, writing strategies, Writers' Workshop/strategies, and a skills-based model. This study also focused on the educational setting in which the student with LD was taught. A pull-out resource room (PO) or a self-contained classroom and an In-Class Direct (ICD) model called inclusion that provides educational services for students with disabilities in a general education classroom with their peers without disabilities. A total of 99 fourth grade students with LD from 15 different elementary schools in the Beach County, Florida School District participated in this study. Forty-three students were in the PO service delivery model and 56 were in the ICD delivery model. Twenty-seven students received strategies instruction, 24 received Writers' Workshop instruction, 21 received skills-based instruction and 27 received Writers' Workshop/strategies instruction. All subjects wrote a response to a narrative prompt from the Florida Writes! assessment for a pretest and posttest measure. The results of this study were analyzed using an ANCOVA design; the pretest score was the covariate. The instructional program was significant at the selected alpha level of.05; F\ (3)=5.022,\ p.05 and the interaction of educational setting with instructional program was non-significant, F\ (3)=2.109,\ p>.05. A Scheffe analysis was conducted and pairwise differences indicated that Writers' Workshop/strategies instructional program made a significant difference in the writing products of the students in this study. There was a significant difference in the results of the subjects who participated in the strategies model and the subjects who participated in the skills-based model.

Although metacognition is an area that has been receiving considerable research interest in recent years, few studies have been concerned with metacognitive knowledge about reading. An even fewer number of studies have included students with learning disabilities (LD) as part of the subject pool. This reality is cause for concern. Increasingly, students with LD are receiving their reading instruction in general education classrooms. Because little is known about the effects of method of reading instruction on students with LD in general education classrooms, the purpose of this study was to determine if there was a difference between the metacognitive awareness about reading of fourth-grade students with LD and without LD (NLD) taught by code-based (CB) and meaning-based (MB) instruction in inclusion classrooms. Further, the study was concerned with determining if there was an interaction between learning condition (LD, NLD) and instructional approach (CB, MB). A total of 88 fourth graders from seven elementary schools in a large south Florida school district participated in the study: 38 were students with LD; 50 were students without LD. Forty-five of the students received their reading instruction in CB classrooms and 43 were taught reading in MB classrooms. All students were given the silent reading section of an informal reading inventory, a metacognitive interview, and a metacognitive questionnaire. Results revealed that although there is a significant difference between the metacognitive knowledge about reading between students with and without LD, this difference did not appear to be influenced by their method of reading instruction. Students with LD consistently scored below students without LD, whether they were in code-based or in meaning-based classrooms.