Educational Research: Fundamentals for the Consumer

Written by leading special education researchers with the National Research Center on Learning Disabilities and the University of Kansas, this comprehensive yet accessible reference provides administrators with practical guidelines for launching RTI in their schools. Highlighting the powerful role that RTI can play in prevention, early intervention, and determining eligibility for special services, the authors cover the three tiers of RTI, schoolwide screening, progress monitoring, and changes in school structures and individual staff roles.

Approaching literacy development as a complex process that unfolds over time, this book gives educators the guidance they need to help students continuously advance and deepen their reading skills — not just in the early grades, but into the upper grades as well. All the suggested ideas and approaches are evidence-based or identified as best practices in reading, so educators can use them with confidence in their classrooms. Equally effective as a text for preservice educators, a manual for in-service teachers, and a resource for administrators wrestling with different approaches to reading instruction, this in-depth, accessible book will lead to sharper skills and better outcomes for a wide range of struggling learners.

In the well-researched and compelling Standardized Minds, former journalist and economist Peter Sacks launches an exhaustive attack on the national obsession with testing — and lands a few hits. If you think you’ve heard every argument against standardized tests, think again. Sacks methodically picks away at our feeble attempts to measure the mind, reaching back into the history of testing with unsettling revelations about the creation of the first intelligence test and its many flaws. He deftly illustrates how the belief of inferior cultures motivated the creator of the SAT college entrance exam and takes on all that standardized testing has wrought: ability grouping, gifted programs, state accountability efforts — even the effect on parents whose perceptions of their own children are often shaken by scores on a sheet of paper. Standardized Minds is a persuasive must-read for parents, educators, and lawmakers that challenges our basic assumptions about intelligence and pays homage to the talented minds we may have overlooked in our fervor to rate the human brain.

Learning Disabilities makes the connection between the characteristics of students with learning disabilities and the classroom tested instructional strategies that work in class. With up-to-date content, this practical guide offers insight into practical educational concerns from a teacher’s perspective, while covering the relevant scholarship to best prepare your students for working with these students.

Until the 1960s a learning disability was a hidden handicap wearing many guises and treated ineffectively. Today, shows the author, founder of the unique Lab School in Washington, D.C., and herself the parent of a learning-disabled child, there is growing evidence that such difficulties can be either overcome or modified by teaching strategies that address the student’s specific strengths. The stories of adults—some of them celebrities like Cher, who suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia—who coped with learning problems throughout their school days illustrate the depths of the disability said to afflict more than 25 million Americans. Distilling her experiences with learning-disabled students, their parents and teachers, Smith demonstrates that a variety of approaches to learning can yield later career success, thus offering hope to children and adults so burdened.

This comprehensive, practical resource gives educators at all levels essential information, techniques, and tools for understanding dyslexia and adapting teaching methods in all subject areas to meet the learning style, social, and emotional needs of students who have dyslexia. Special features include over 50 full-page activity sheets that can be photocopied for immediate use and interviews with students and adults who have had personal experience with dyslexia. Organized into twenty sections, information covers everything from ten principles of instruction to teaching reading, handwriting, spelling, writing, math, everyday skills, and even covers the adult with dyslexia.