Special Education - Where is the REAL DATA?
Working on a paper for another class, I was wondering where the data was that broke down the percentage passing for students with disabilities on the Virginia SOLs. This lack of information encouraged me to call Dr. Wickman in assessment at Virginia's Department of Education. She was extremely helpful and said that she working on gathering the data. She mailed to me a link with the requested breakdown between students with and without disabilities. Basically, it appears that our students with disabilities are at a plateau that is right around 50% passing for all subjects across all grades; however, there are many unanswered questions.
I would still like to know how students with disabilities are performing at subcategory levels, especially in math; for example, do autistics perform better at computation or geometry. Why would I want to know this? I have now met about 120 autistic middle school boys who all have very similar characteristics like poor handwriting, bumping into people and things, and toe walking (i.e. student does not place heel all the way down as he is walking.) Dr. Megson says that many of these kids "see" the world like a David Hockney photocollage. If these kids really see the world this way, it would explain why they bumped into walls and people as well as not being able to look at your face when talking. It would explain why so many of these kids absolutely hate to write and have poor coordination.
posted by QueenAnne at 4:34 PM
2 Comments:
What do you mean by more writing? Do you see more prolific writers or just writers who take a long time to get to the point? Just curious from a personal interest point of view.
I actually meant to say poor handwriting. The handwriting of these students is never between the lines nor it is controlled in size. The writing is often disjointed by blurbs and chunks like a computer program shorthand of sorts.
You raise another question that I had not thought about because I was only looking at the physical actions of these kids and that is the type of writing that I see. I see two types of writers. Some of the writers have very prolific thoughts and I would actually call them the gifted and talented savants. The other writers are unable to express their ideas by their chunks or blurbs. I feel that these kids are more apraxic. They are unable to get to the point and suffer from more cognitive processing skills than the prolific group.
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