Disability and inclusion publications

What do we know about young children with delays and disabilities, and how can we help them succeed in prekindergarten through third grade?
To begin with, Kathleen Hebbeler and Donna Spiker write, identifying children with delays and disabilities to receive specialized services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act poses several challenges. First, even though eligibility is based on 14 disability categories listed in the law, each state determines its own criteria for those conditions. Second, young children—especially those with disabilities—are hard to assess. Third, deciding where to draw the line for eligibility along a continuum of functioning is a matter of policy rather than science. In recent decades, the authors note, the concept of disability has been moving away from a medical model that sees disability as an impairment that resides in the child and toward a framework that emphasizes children’s functioning and interaction with their environments.
The authors review effective ways to support development and learning among young children with disabilities, including language and social skills interventions, preschool curricula, instructional and other practices, and multi-tiered systems of support. Then they examine a critical policy issue: the inclusion of young children with disabilities in regular education classrooms. One critical finding is that high-quality instruction in general education classrooms is a major factor in good educational outcomes for children with disabilities, and for their successful inclusion from preschool to third grade. Moreover, improving the quality of general education benefits all children, not just those with disabilities.
Hebbeler and Spiker also examine what we know about the transitions young children with disabilities make from one setting to another—for example, from prekindergarten to kindergarten. Here they conclude that we need far more research if we’re to understand what makes such transitions successful.

The authors of this article analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 to determine the effect of receiving transition planning education and having a transition plan that specified needed postsecondary accommodations on the receipt of disability-specific services and generally available supports at the postsecondary level by students with disabilities. Propensity model analyses indicated that both variables significantly increased the odds that students with disabilities would receive disability-specific and generally available supports at 2-year institutions. In addition, students with transition plans specifying accommodations were more likely to receive disability-related supports at career and technical education (CTE) schools, and CTE students who had received transition planning education in high school were more likely to receive generally available supports. The results provide important implications for policy and practice, and a strong foundation for further exploration of the linkages between transition planning experiences and receipt of disability-specific and generally available supports at postsecondary schools.