Jump to:
▪ 301: Education of Exceptional Children
▪ 401/501: Teaching Students with Disabilities
▪ 470/571:
Prevention and Remediation of Reading Disabilities
▪ 520: Teaching in Inclusive Classrooms
▪ 522: RTI Practices Across the Core Academic Curriculum
▪ 522: Seminar in Single Subject Design Research Methodology
301: Education of Exceptional Children
Course Description: explore issues and trends in Special Education from children with disabilities and their families.
The student will: demonstrate your understanding and appreciation of the historical contexts from which Special Education developed as an academic discipline, describe significant federal and Washington State legislation and its impact on children and families receiving Special Education services, define which students are eligible for Special Education services, become familiar with the established categories of disabilities according to IDEA, discuss the important issues related to diversity and multiculturalism in Special Education (including gender bias, ethnicity, English Language Learners, socio-economic status, and geographic factors,) and describe the special education process including the roles of parents and professional in educational planning meetings (i.e. IEP/IFSP development), team collaboration, confidentiality issues, and service delivery options.
401/501: Teaching Students with Disabilities
Course Description: Intervention and monitoring strategies for managing academic as well as social and problem behaviors in classroom settings.
The student will: demonstrate an understanding of common academic intervention strategies and methods effective in teaching students with disabilities in reading, writing, math and content areas; demonstrate an understanding and ability to complete a functional behavior analysis and develop a positive behavior intervention plan based on that data; demonstrate an understanding of and ability to use effective procedures and strategies for teaching pro-social skills and addressing behavioral problems; understand and use organization and management systems to collect and analyze data on challenging behaviors; and understand the characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorders and applicable intervention startegies.
470/571: Prevention and Remediation of Reading Disabilities
Course Description: Focus on the prevention, history, current definition, assessment, remedial strategies, and adaptive technology for reading disabilities.
The student will: understand steps that can be taken to possibly prevent reading disability, increase their knowledge of the history of methods of literacy instruction, define the concept of reading disability, increase their knowledge of assessments applicable to reading disability (i.e., Response to Intervention (RTI), understand the relationship between reading and writing skills, increase their knowledge of remedial strategies to address the needs of students who have a reading disability, and increase their knowledge of applicable adaptive technology to reading disability.
520: Teaching in Inclusive Classrooms
Course Description: This course is open to anyone interested in learning about inclusion strategies for students in K-12 general education classrooms. The focus is on collaboration, consultation, and adapting and modifying the general education curriculum for students with disabilities. The course will also address effective teaching strategies, within the special education field.
The student will: increase their knowledge of characteristics of each of the exceptionalities (learning disability, autism, etc) as defined by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA); increase their skills in collaboration, communication, and consultation when working with teacher colleagues, parents, administrators, other related service personnel, as well as community agencies and service providers; design, use, and model a wide range of methods in the instruction of students with disabilities for implementation in inclusion classrooms; increase skills in adapting, modifying, and differentiating curriculum and instruction to meet the needs of students with disabilities; and increase their knowledge of Response to Intervention as a method for identification of students with characteristics of having a learning disability in the general education/inclusion classroom context.
522: RTI (Response-to-Intervention) Practices Across the Core Academic Curriculum
Course Description: This course is intended for doctoral and master’s-level students who focus on education-related issues. The course’s content will focus on response to intervention and learning disability issues as discussed in the research literature relative to best educational practices.
Students will understand: how learning disability has arrived at its present conceptual definition, how one may know that a student has a learning disability, how response to intervention (RTI) aims to evade the problems of the traditional IQ/achievement discrepancy method of assessment, and school-level RTI models currently being used across the US.
522: Seminar in Single Subject Design Research Methodology
Course Description: This course is intended for doctoral and master’s-level students who focus on education. The course’s content will focus on a research methodology called “single-subject design.” The name of the design (“single”) is a misnomer because there is never just one student but rather three or more students/small groups. Other research designs require large sample sizes to define significant improvement. Single-subject design was created for doing research with small sample sizes within a school building or district such as students with deafness or autism; but, any students or small groups with or without a disability can be used as participants in this research format.
Single-subject design is quantitative in nature but without a focus on statistics per se. Instead, the data are based on observation ratings or student assessments completed periodically during the intervention timeline (typically 25 sessions). In essence, single-subject design offers a format for assessing students’ improvement with a skills-based intervention (e.g., academic, behavior). This research format can also be useful for classroom teachers who need to monitor low-performing students’ improvement within a response-to-intervention (RTI) framework.
The latest reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (2004) provides states and districts with the option of using response to intervention (RTI) as a means to identify students with a disability as early as kindergarten. In Washington State, school districts have already begun to implement RTI in general education classrooms.
Who could benefit from the class’ topic and content: special education graduate students: single-subject design is a prevalent research-design methodology for defining students’ progress with an intervention; educational psychology/school psychology graduate students: single-subject design is a common research-design methodology used in the field/research literature; and master’s students: single-subject design could serve as a manageable format for the 702 data collection project