Learners With Mild Disabilities: A Characteristics Approach

Learners with Mild Disabilities focuses on four high-prevalence disabilities; mild mental retardation, learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, and ADHD, as well as briefer consideration of other mild conditions such as Asperger Syndrome. This text looks first at disability from conventional categorical perspectives, and then focuses on the perspective of alternative, non-categorical frameworks.

This text describes students with disabilities with respect to their individual strengths and needs, considering their cognitive, perceptual, language, academic learning, and social/emotional characteristics. The reader is encouraged to apply these conceptual frameworks though analysis of the numerous vignettes and extended case studies throughout the text, stories drawn from the experiences of real children and teachers. The separate categorical approaches around which other texts are organized tend to reinforce the notion of discrete disabilities, which current experience and philosophical discussions in the field of special education increasingly do not support and which do not prepare new special educators for the complex nature of services for students with mild disabilities.

Learners with Mild Disabilities is designed as a primary text for use in undergraduate and graduate courses addressing the characteristics of learners with high prevalence or milder levels of disability and is useful as a text for the first specialized course in a special education program. It supports programs in “generic special education,” a growing area of study as a number of states move toward generic or non-categorical certification.

New to this Edition:

• Presents IDEA 2004 and its regulations in a clear and concise manner.

• The chapters on learning disabilities and emotional/behavioral disorders have been significantly revised to reflect the impact of IDEA 2004’s response to intervention framework.

• New material has been added on English Language Learners (Ch. XYZ).

• Presents updated child count data from the most recent Annual Report of the Implementation of IDEA (2006) to help readers understand the magnitude of the numbers of students served in special education currently.

• Thinking and Discussion questions added to the opening Vignettes and closing Case Studies in Chapters 3, 6, 7.