Tangibles

6 Research Based Instructional Strategies

• Cooperative Grouping

                   1. It is a generic term that refers to numerous methods for grouping students.

                   2. Face to face promotive interaction

                               a. helping each other learn

                               b. applauding success and efforts

                   3. Interpersonal and small-group skills are in place, including:

                               a. communication

                               b. decision making

                               c. conflict resolution

                               d. time management

                    4. There are three designs:

                               a. informal groups (share-pairs, turn to a neighbor, etc.)

                               b. formal groups (academic assignments, several days/weeks)

                               c. base groups (long term)

                    5. Individual and group accountability

                               a. each student must contribute for accomplishment of group goals

• Similarities and Differences

                     1. There are several different ways to identify similarities and differences:

                              a. comparing and contrasting

                              b. sorting

                              c. classifying

                              d. metaphors

                              e. analogies

                              f. similes

                    2. Providing students with guidance in identifying similarities and differences can aid students' understanding of and ability to use knowledge.

                    3. Asking a student to independently identify similarities and differences enhances students' undersanding of content areas.

                    4. Representing similarities and differences in graphic or symbolic form provides students with a strategy to better organize their understanding of specific                        

                        knowledge. Identification of similarities and differences is a student-centered robust activity to enhance learning.

• Nonlinguistic Representations

                   1. Learners can acquire and retain knowledge nonlinguistically through:

                             a. visual imagery - When students make concept maps, idea weebs and other types of nonlinguistic representation they are actively creating a model of

                                 their thinking.

                             b. auditory experiences - When students explain their models, they are puytting their thinking into words.

                             c. kinesthetic or whole-body mode - Dramatizations and computer simulations also encourage exploration and experimentatioin by allowing learners to

                                 manipulate their learning experience and visualize results.

• Homework and Practice

                   1. There are two purposes for assigning homework:

                             a. It provides timea nd experience to develop study habits that support learning.

                             b. They experience the results of their effort as well as the ability to cope with mistakes and difficulty.

                   2. Parents should facilitate homework completion, not teach content. They should also not do it for them.

                   3. The teacher should give feedback and instructive comments in timely manner.

                   4. Time required for a student to do homework is decided by multiplying the grade level by 10 to approximate the right amount of minutes spent per night.

• Advance Organizers

                   1. They allow students to organize information in advance of actually encountering the material under study.

                   2. Advance organizers, including graphic ones, help students learn new concepts and vocabulary. Presenting information graphically as well as symbolically in an                

                       advance oranizer reinforces vocabulary learning and supports reading skills.

                   3. Students learn more when they are presented information in several modes.

• Cues and Questions

                   1. Learning increases when teachers focus their questions on content that is most important, not what they think will be most interesting to students. 

                   2. Higher-level questions that ask students to analyze information result in more learning than simply asking students to recall information. 

                   3. By increasing the amount of "wait time" after asking a question, teachers foster increased student discourse and more student-to-student interaction.

CIT: Comprehensible Input Techniques:

     Modeling                           Hands-On                       Realia                           Teacher-Made Pictures

  Overhead Projector              Demonstration                      Multimedia                     Timeline

     Graphs                                       Maps

Equity: Similarities and Differences Diagram

Equity: e/learning review

1. Autism: Autism means a developmental disability significantly affecting verbal and nonverbal communication and social interaction, generally evident before age 3, that adversely affects educational performance. An autistic student may have an inability to relate to people except as objects, inability to express affection, or ability to build and maintain only distant, suspicious, or bizarre relationships.
2. Deaf-Blindness: Deaf blindness means concomitant hearing and visual impairments, the combination of which causes such severe communication and other developmental and educational needs that they cannot be accommodated in special education programs solely for children with deafness or children with blindness. Due to the seriousness of sensory impairment, children in Texas with auditory or visual handicaps are eligible for services at birth. The more severe the impairment, the more services are required.
3. Deafness: Deafness is a hearing impairment which refers to a hearing disability which may vary in severity from mild to profound. Hearing impairment includes two categories. Deaf individuals are those who are unable to process linguistic information through hearing, with or without amplification. Individuals considered to be hard of hearing have enough residual hearing to be able to process language through the ear.
4. Emotional Disturbance: Seriously emotionally disturbed means a condition exhibiting one or more of the following characterisitics over a long period of time and to a marked extent, which adversely affects educational performance: (a) an inability to learn which cannot be explained by intellectual, sensory, or health factors; (b) an inability to build or maintain satisfactory relationships with peers and teachers; (c) inappropriate types of behavior or feelings under normal circumstances; (d) a general pervasive mood of unhappiness or depression; or (e) a tendency to develop physical symptoms or fears associated with personal or school problems.
5. Hearing Impairment: Hearing impairment means an impairment in hearing, whether permanent or fluctuating that adversely affects a child's educational performance but that is not included under the definition of deafness in the section. TAC lumps deafness and hearing impaired under one category: hearing impaired.
6. Mental Retardation: Mental retardation refers to significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning resulting in or associated with concurrent impairments in adaptive behavior and manifested during the developmental period. The report of individual assessment must specify the degree of mental retardation.
7. Multiple Disabilites: Multiple disabilites mean concomitant impairments. The combination of which causes such severe educational needs that they cannot be accommodated in special educational programs solely for one of the impairments. The term does not include deaf-blindness.
8. Orthopedic Impairment: Orthopedic impairment means severe orthopedic impairments that adversely affect a child's educational performance. The term includes impairments caused by congenital anomaly, impairments caused by disease, and impairments from other causes.
9. Other Health Impairment: Other health impairment means having limited strength, vitality, or alertness, including a heightened alrtness to environmental stimuli, that results in limited alertness with respect to the educational environment that: (a) is due to chronic or acute health problems such as asthma, attention deficit disorder or attention deficit disorder, diabetes, epilepsy, a heart condition, hemphilia, lead poisoning, leukemia, nephritis, rheumatic defer, and sickle cell anemia; and Tourette syndrome and (b) adversely affects a child's educational performance.
10. Specific Learning Disability: Specific learning disability means a disorder of one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, which may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, read, write, spell, or do arithmetic calculations. The term includes such conditions as perceptual handicaps, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia.
11. Speech or Language Impairment: Speech impairment is defined as a communication disorder, such as stuttering, impaired articulation, a language impairment, or a voice impairment which adversely affects a child's educational performance. The majority of speech problems of school age children are those of articulation and fall into four categories: substitution, distortion, omission, and addition.
12. Traumatic Brain Injury: Traumatic brain injury means an acquired injury to the brain caused by an external physical force, resulting in total or partional functional disability or psychosocial impairment, or both, that adversely affects a child's education performance. The term applies to open or closed head injuries resulting in impairments in one or more areas, such as cognition, language, memory, attention, reasoning, abstract thinking, judgment, problem solving, sensory, perceptual and motor abilites, psychosocial behavior, physical functions, information processing, and speech.
13. Visual Impairment Including Blindness: Visual impairment is an impairment in vision that, even with correction, adversely affects a child's educational performance. The term includes both partial sight and blindess.
14. Noncategorical: TAC defines noncategorical as a student between the ages of 3-5 who is evaluated as having mental retardation, emotional disturbance, a specific learning disability, or autism, may be described as noncategorical early childhood.

Equity: 9 Types of Accommodations/Modifications

1. Quantity: Adapt the number of items that the learner is expected to learn or number of activities student will complete prior to assessment for mastery.
2. Time: Adapt the time alotted and allowed for learning, task completion, or testing.
3. Level of Support: Increase the amount of personal assistance to keep the student on task or to reinforce or prompt use of specific skills. Enhance adult-student relationship; use physical space and environmental structure.
4. Input: Adapt the way instruction is delivered to the learner.
5. Difficulty: Adapt the skill level, problem type, or the rules on how the learner may approach the work.
6. Output: Adapt how the student can respond to instruction.
7. Participation: Adapt the extent to which a learner is actively involved in the task.
8. Alternate Goals: Adapt the goals or outcome expectations while using the same materials. When routinely utilized, this is ony for students with moderate to severe disabilities.
9. Substitute Curriculum: Provide different instruction and materials to meet a learner's individual goals. When routinely utilized, this is only for students with moderate to severe disabilities.