July 1, 1999
Contact: Peggy Shaw, (615) 322-NEWS [email protected]
Center seeks to accelerate learning for young children with disabilities
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Young children with learning disabilities who have trouble in reading, writing and math often carry these deficiencies into adulthood unless teachers intervene with special programs. Current research indicates, however, that most early intervention programs are not successful.
Now investigators at a new center based at Vanderbilt University are taking a hard look at intervention programs for children with disabilities in the primary grades. The Center on Accelerating Students Learning (CASL) is a five-year, collaborative research effort among Vanderbilt, Teachers College of Columbia University and the University of Maryland. Funded with a $3.5-million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, CASL will bring together research from more than 40 public schools in Maryland, New York and Tennessee in an effort to solve problems in existing intervention programs for all low-performers, and accelerate learning for students with disabilities in the primary grades.
According to Lynn and Doug Fuchs, professors of special education at Vanderbilt's Peabody College of education and human development and lead researchers for the new center, reading and writing failure typically begins in kindergarten and is difficult to remediate beyond the primary grades. "When children fail early at reading and writing, they begin to dislike reading and read less than their classmates," said Lynn Fuchs. "As a consequence, they lose an important means for gaining vocabulary, background knowledge and information about how reading material is structured."
Reading and writing difficulties affect nearly all children with learning disabilities, the Fuchs said. Math difficulties are also widespread among this student group.
"Math failure, like reading failure, begins in kindergarten, and learning problems become increasingly complex and difficult to remediate throughout the primary grades," said Doug Fuchs. "After third grade, math failure is highly resistant to intervention."
Why do many classroom interventions fail for low-performing children with disabilities? According to the Fuchs, both graduates of the University of Minnesota and former elementary school teachers, some programs begin too late. Other practices are difficult to use in classrooms, and many are not comprehensive enough to meet the multifaceted problems of students with disabilities.
Interventions have largely ignored the development of fluency (speed and ease of reading, writing or doing math) and the need to plan instruction in ways that help students transfer learning from one specific situation to other situations and maintain those skills over time, said Doug Fuchs. "Early instruction for kids with disabilities focuses almost exclusively on basic skills," he explained. "For students with disabilities, attention to fluency, transfer and maintenance is essential."
Each investigator from the three institutions that comprise CASL will bring a particular kind of instructional expertise to the center, according to Lynn Fuchs, whose own strengths are in assessment and instruction. "One of the primary goals of this project is to take the varied expertise and bridge them to build a more comprehensive, state-of-the-art approach to working with children," she said.
For more information about the Center on Accelerating Students Learning, visit the CASL Web site at www.vanderbilt.edu/CASL.
News about Vanderbilt can be found on the Media Relations homepage at www.vanderbilt.edu/News and the News Service homepage at www.vanderbilt.edu/News/news. Additional information about Peabody College is at: http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/peabody.
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