Exceptional Children

Stakeholders are debating the value of cognitively focused instruction for students who have not benefited from a skills-based approach. Much of the discussion, however, is occurring without recognition of research that has been conducted in the past 2 decades. In this article, we reviewed the research. Electronic databases and hard copies of scholarly journals were searched; 239 references were identified; and 50 pertinent studies were analyzed to determine the effects of cognitively focused instruction—delivered alone or in combination with academic instruction—on students described as demonstrating poor academic achievement, learning disabilities, or specific cognitive deficits. Findings suggest that several cognitive interventions accelerated low-achieving students academic progress. Nevertheless, when the research is taken as a whole—when the pertinent studies and the interventions they describe are considered with regard to their content, quality, and results—we conclude that it does not support the use of cognitively focused instruction at this time. Implications for future research are discussed.

Previous researchers have found that special education teacher shortages are pervasive and exacerbated by federal policies regarding “highly qualified” teacher requirements. The authors examined special education teacher personnel data from 2 federal data sources to determine if these sources offer a reliable and valid means of determining teacher shortages. Findings indicate that critical discrepancies exist at the state and national levels due to discrepancies between data sources, definitions, and missing data points. In addition, the number of not highly qualified special educators fluctuated widely by data source, possibly indicating an exponential rise in the use of long-term substitutes. Increased collaboration and coordination between state and federal agencies is recommended to ensure valid and reliable teacher qualification data collection and analysis.

Using a single-subject reversal design, this study evaluated the use of a compare-contrast strategy on the ability of students with autism spectrum disorder to comprehend science text. Three middle school students with high-functioning autism and their teacher participated in this study. A content analysis comparing the number of meaning units in passages to the number of meaning units in student-completed Venn diagrams was conducted for both the treatment and maintenance phases. Results indicated that instruction in the compare-contrast text pattern was effective in increasing participants' comprehension. A content analysis of Venn diagrams revealed a decrease in number of recorded meaning units during the maintenance phase while passage comprehension remained high. Future research and implications for classroom interventions are discussed.

We compare beginning special and general education teachers’ access to school-based colleagues. Our findings demonstrate that colleague relationships are critical for the experiences of beginning teachers, as are the school organizational norms that these beginning teachers experience. For special education teachers in particular, perception of colleague support was a strong predictor of retention plans. Similar results were seen with respect to their perception of the level of collective responsibility among the faculty. Taken together, these results suggest that schools and districts should make efforts to facilitate productive relationships between general and special education faculty, as well as to differentiate induction support for beginning special educators.