DISABILITIES

Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

No Child Left Behind legislation stipulates that schools are responsible for academic learning of all children, including children with special needs (No Child Left Behind Act, 2001). Over at least the last 10 years, public educators have put concerted effort into modifying their curriculum so that it contains a scope and sequence of skills that are aimed at meeting local, state, and national benchmark standards of academic achievement.

This has been particularly the case with literacy as there are a significant number of illiterate adults who have not earned a high school diploma or the equivalent (Lasater & Elliot, 2004). Within the area of literacy, the focus of research and practice has primarily been in helping students develop reading skills. However, literacy encompasses more than the fundamental skill of reading; it also includes the critical skill of written expression.

According to Clay (1975), young children emerge as writers when they scribble, draw symbols, and make recurring marks on paper (e.g., repeating loops resembling a cursive lowercase “l”). She observed that eventually children progress from forming letters and words through spelling and spontaneous writing activities to writing purposeful compositions when conventions of written language are acquired.

Often, the demands of school curricular require students to make written responses when demonstrating their knowledge about various content areas. For instance, most examinations and other types of independent seatwork require written responses. However, the need to acquire writing skills serves functions that go beyond formal schooling requirements. For example, written expression is a major form of communication in a technological society; writing emails, texting, and web-based messaging have increasingly become just as common as talking on the telephone and may even, for the most part, replace telephone messaging in and outside of the workplace. Thus, written communication facilitates inclusion within the social mainstream (Deatline-Buchman & Jitendra, 2006).

Although the demand for acquiring adequate written communication skills has increased in our advanced technological society, students are not getting adequate instruction in written expression. Proficiency in written expression requires mastery and integration of a myriad of skills, such as ideation, vocabulary, organization of thoughts, knowledge of text structures, self-regulation, spelling, grammar, and punctuation (Bui, Schumaker, & Deshler, 2006). Because written expression is a complex process and students do not develop it naturally, teachers struggle with how to best facilitate their students' execution of the writing process (Graham & Harris, 1997).

Moreover, writing instruction may not be a high priority in the general education classroom because teachers are required to be accountable for their students' adequate yearly progress in reading, math, and science, however, not for students' writing (NCLB, 2001).

Students with disabilities are provided with even fewer opportunities to learn written expression skills during their formal schooling years in contrast to their peers without disabilities (Berninger et al., 1998; Erickson, Koppenhaver, & Yoder, 1994). The differences between students with disabilities and their same age peers without disabilities can be observed both in their writing quality and quantity as well as their knowledge of various text genres ...