Mark P. Mostert

Responsiveness to Intervention and the Identification of Specific Learning Disability: A Critique and Alternative Proposal.

Responsiveness to intervention (RTI) is being proposed as an alternative model for making decisions about the presence or absence of specific learning disability. We argue that many questions about RTI remain unanswered, and that radical changes in the proposed regulations are not warranted at this time. Since many fundamental issues related to RTI have not been resolved, a better strategy may be to more rigorously implement existing identification criteria (e.g., discrepancy and psychological processing deficits) in a structured psychometric framework. Suggestions for how to modify present procedures are provided.

Social Skills Interventions for Individuals with Learning Disabilities.

Social skill deficits have become a defining characteristic of students with specific learning disability (SLD). Attempts have been made to enhance social functioning through structured training approaches. The effectiveness of these efforts was evaluated in a quantitative research synthesis (meta-analysis), which revealed a “small” effect with very few differences among teachers, peers, or students with SLD themselves who judged the efficacy of training. The relatively modest effects are discussed in relation to a number of theoretical psychometric and design issues that might account for the limited treatment outcomes.

Useless Eaters Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany

The methods used for mass extermination in the Nazi death camps originated and were perfected in earlier use against people with physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities. This article describes the historical context of attitudes toward people with disabilities in Germany and how this context produced mass murder of people with disabilities prior to and during the early years of World War II. Several key marker variables, the manipulation of which allowed a highly sophisticated Western society to officially sanction the murder of people with disabilities, are examined. Important implications must continually be drawn from these sad events as we work with people with disabilities at the dawn of a new century.

Facilitated Communication and Its Legitimacy—Twenty-First Century Developments

By 2001, Facilitated Communication (FC) had largely been empirically discredited as an effective intervention for previously uncommunicative persons with disabilities, especially those with autism and related disorders. Key empirical findings consistently showed that the facilitator and not the client initiated communication. I analyze the extant efficacy literature since 2001, noting that it reveals similar trends to past findings. However, the FC literature since 2001 also shows increasing acceptance of the technique, ignoring empirical findings to the contrary. Further, more recent pro-FC literature has moved beyond acknowledging that FC is “controversial” to a working assumption that it is an effective and legitimate intervention.

Reclaiming the History of Special Education for More Effective Practice

Special educators seem susceptible to the adaptation of untried and ineffective interventions. A vexing question related to the credibility of the field is why, historically, ineffective interventions persist and appear with cyclical regularity. We suggest that one way to reduce adaptation of questionable interventions is to place more emphasis in our professional culture on the history of special education, specifically the history of effective and ineffective interventions. We further suggest that educators more familiar with the history of special educations effective interventions will be better prepared to actively discriminate effective from ineffective interventions in their current work. We also offer a rationale explaining the confluence of influences to be considered in teaching the history of special education as a catalyst for more insightful and selective special education practice.

Assessing Professional Collaboration in Schools: Knowing What Works

Teacher collaboration has become an legitimate service delivery option for students with disabilities and students at risk for learning and/or behavior problems. Notwithstanding its growing popularity, there is little empirical research on the fidelity of implementation of intervention plans that stem from professional collaboration. The modest body of available research focuses more on process than outcomes. Accordingly, the authors draw on the literature to propose a multidimensional model for school personnel to evaluate the actual impact of collaboration.

Is Brain Gym an Effective Educational Intervention

Brain Gym® (BG; BGI, 2008) is a popular commercial program sold by Brain Gym® International (BGI). Making extravagant claims for improved intellectual and physical development, it is used in more than 80 countries. While BGIs claims are persuasive, to date there is little empirical evidence validating the approach. We examine some theoretical assumptions from which BGI was developed, review the efficacy literature, and provide suggestions for making informed decisions about the judiciousness of investing time and resources in this program.

Truth and Consequences

Ideas influencing teacher education and services to children with disabilities in schools have palpable, far-reaching consequences. Recently, several authors have taken special education to task for relying on practices established through the tenets of Western science, proposing the antidote of postmodern thought to redress the alleged positivistic failure of special education. While using the obtuse rhetoric of power relations, oppression, and the denial of disability, they offer little to address what teachers should do in classrooms. We briefly address and comment on some issues they raise and conclude that what these postmodernists have to offer is a regrettable step backward in the discourse surrounding what it means to educate and support people with disabilities.

Characteristics of Meta-Analyses Reported in Mental Retardation, Learning Disabilities, and Emotional and Behavioral Disorders.

Face validity of meta-analyses is important given the summative nature of the technique and special educations increasing reliance on their apparently definitive results. However, reported meta-analytic information is often incomplete, thereby significantly influencing judgment of meta-analytic face validity and any subsequent conclusions for theory and practice. Twenty-four meta-analyses in mental retardation, learning disabilities, and emotional behavior disorders were reviewed and analyzed across 6 domains of information necessary for securing face validity of published meta-analyses. Results indicate a wide variation in the amount of reported data similar to Mostert (1996), which could influence the summative results of meta-analyses. In addition, temporal analysis of 44 meta-analyses in special education indicates increasingly higher proportions of information appearing in later than earlier meta-analyses.

Evaluation of Research for Usable Knowledge in Behavioral Disorders: Ignoring the Irrelevant, Considering the Germane.

A central and ongoing concern in the field of emotional or behavioral disorders (E/BD) relates to the efficacy of educational and behavioral interventions. Recently, wider debates about how knowledge is generated have impacted the field, sometimes leading to less than useful debates around positivist versus postpositivist research approaches for generating knowledge. These debates detract from the immediate need of establishing the real-world worth of interventions for children and youth with E/BD. We suggest that reorientation to a more evaluative stance is necessary to generate usable knowledge for effective practice. This is most ably accomplished through the rigor of analytical narrative synthesis and meta-analysis, which we see as far more useful than qualitative approaches. The evaluative power of these two approaches is illustrated by examples related to the efficacy of Facilitated Communication and social skills instruction and by comparing evaluations of behavioral interventions via medication and diet.