IMPLEMENTATION PLANS
Stage 6 for POWER: Independent Performance
At this stage the student is ready to use the strategy independently. The teacher’s main task is to monitor students’ performance and check on proper and consistent use of the strategy. If students deviate from the given POWER strategy, performance will be eval-uated, and action will be taken only if performance is no longer improving.
Teachers also must evaluate whether or not the strategy is being generalized to other appropriate situations. Students will not always generalize strategies to
appropri-ate situations; they will often need to be prompted and encouraged to do so. To pro-mote generalization, students will be encouraged to use the strategy in other content areas where they are required to write expository papers. All team teachers will be informed about the use of the strategy, the prompts, and what is required at each step.
All team teachers will be given a wall chart to hang up in their room as a reminder for students to use the POWER strategy when appropriate. Note that these activities can begin earlier in the instructional process.
Students will keep a writing portfolio; this will allow them to see the difference that the use of the strategy has made in the content of their writing. To create the port-folio:
1. Collect initial baseline probes—These probes will be used in the initial confer-ence and as part of the scaffolding process. They will also serve to illustrate the development of the student’s written compositions.
2. Take writing samples during strategy instruction. This is a way to demonstrate student progress through the use of the POWER strategy.
3. Take a final sample, which will be included once it is determined that the stu-dent has reached mastery of strategy use.
Portfolios serve many purposes; the main purpose is to provide evidence of improved academic performance. These portfolios will be evaluated by several people:
students, teachers, parents, and administrators. After evaluating their own portfolio, students will be questioned to find out whether or not they see an improvement in their writing skill and if they see the strategy as valuable to them or not. The teacher will evaluate the portfolio to provide evidence of improved academic performance for grading purposes.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Writing is a complex task requiring attention to multiple processes. Negotiating and coordinating skills, knowledge, strategies, and conventions of written language can be difficult even for skilled writers. These processes are even more difficult for students with LD. Students with LD often lack the knowledge, skills, and strategies to be effec-tive writers, and do not understand that writing is purposeful. They have difficulty expressing their ideas, focus on mechanical aspects of written communication, use unproductive strategies to facilitate their writing, and do not attend to critical elements of writing. It is also important to attend closely to prerequisite skills, particularly tran-scription skills and spelling. Students with LD also often lack the prerequisite skills necessary to effective writers. This makes the writing process even more difficult.
Despite the difficulties inherent in the writing process, the evidence is clear that, through strategy instruction, students with LD can be taught to attend to the critical elements of writing: planning, organizing, and revising, which can provide them with the knowledge, skills, and strategies to be effective writers.
REFERENCES
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(1998). Early intervention for spelling problems: Teaching functional spelling units of varying size with a multiple-connection framework. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 587–605.
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(1997). Treatment of handwriting problems in beginning writers: Transfer from handwriting to composition. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(4), 652–666.
De La Paz, S. (1999). Self-regulated strategy instruction in regular education settings: Improving outcomes for students with and without learning disabilities. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 14(2), 92–106.
De La Paz, S., & Graham, S. (1995). Dictation: Application to writing for students with learning disabilities. In T. Scruggs & M. Mastropieri (Eds.), Advances in learning and behavioral disor-ders (Vol. 9, pp. 227–247). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Englert, C. S., & Mariage, T. V. (1991). Shared understandings: Structuring the writing experience through dialogue. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 24(6), 330–342.
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Strategies in
Reading Comprehension
R
eading comprehension is considered the “essence of reading” (Durkin, 1993). If readers can read the words but do not understand what they are reading, they are not really reading. Reading, at some level, is involved in all academic courses. Students are expected to read a variety of texts and comprehend them in order to gain knowledge.While reading comprehension in schools usually involves understanding textbook assignments, reading comprehension skills can also influence a student’s ability to understand written directions, homework assignments, and other literature. Compre-hension of text is not exclusive to academic learning; it is also essential to being a life-long learner. Thus, improving students’ reading comprehension can positively impact both educational outcomes and other aspects of their lives.
Comprehension of text requires a wide variety of skills and cognitive processes.
Students must be able to negotiate, manipulate, translate, and construct meaning from written language (King, 1994). Proficient readers not only read fluently, they also con-struct meaning through interactions with text (Durkin, 1993). There is a reciprocal inter-action between the reader and the ideas or message presented in a particular text. Good readers continuously construct and reconstruct meaning while reading. They are able to activate background knowledge prior to reading (prereading strategies). They moni-tor comprehension while reading (during-reading strategies), and they check for understanding after reading (postreading strategies) (National Reading Panel, 2000).
These strategies are automatic to good readers, however many of these concepts seem to elude struggling readers, including students with LD. Thus, instruction for strug-gling readers must address these deficits.
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Research on text comprehension demonstrates that students with LD can be taught to use comprehension strategies (Bakken, Mastropieri, & Scruggs, 1997; Englert &
Mariage, 1991; Gardill & Jitendra, 1999; Idol, 1987; Johnson, Graham, & Harris, 1997;
Nelson, Smith, & Dodd, 1992). It is important that comprehension be addressed early on. Comprehension strategies should be taught in the primary grades; reading compre-hension should be emphasized from the beginning rather than waiting until students have mastered the prerequisite skills of reading (National Reading Panel, 2000). Effec-tive reading comprehension strategies should be taught explicitly, through direct expla-nation, modeling, and guided practice. Students should be made aware that the overall goal is improved reading comprehension, and understood the importance of the strat-egy to achieving that goal. The stratstrat-egy should be demonstrated along with the meta-cognitive processes associated with it; students should be provided ample opportuni-ties to practice using the strategy, and directed through the process until they have mastered it.
PROBLEMS FOR STUDENTS WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES
Students with LD have particular difficulty with many of the skills involved in compre-hending text. By definition, students with LD experience unexpected failure to learn.
The overwhelming majority of students with LD (at least 80%) experience serious diffi-culty learning to read (Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001). Clearly students with LD are not a homogeneous group; however there are some commonalities that can be noted. Many students with LD show specific deficits in the area of phonological pro-cessing (decoding—sound/symbol correlation) and fluency (decoding with speed, accuracy, and expression). These deficits affect their ability to comprehend text. How-ever, many other children with LD are able to read reasonably fluently but do not understand what they have read because of specific cognitive processing difficulties (Williams, 2003). Thus, some students with LD possess the cognitive abilities necessary to effectively comprehend text; however, for some reason they do so inefficiently or ineffectively (Gersten et al., 2001).
Reading comprehension involves strategic processing of language and concepts;
students must be able to take in information from written language, organize that information in a logical manner, and construct meaning from that information. Stu-dents with LD often have greater difficulty with this, and breakdowns often occur because they are unable to regulate their cognitive processes in a purposeful, reflective manner (Gersten et al., 2001). Swanson and Alexander (1997) identified four particular cognitive processes that pose difficulties for students with LD: (1) phonological pro-cessing (noted earlier), (2) orthographic and semantic propro-cessing, (3) metacognition, and (4) working memory.