Adolescent Literacy and Older Students With Learning Disabilities

Background

The National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities (NJCLD) recognizes the importance of addressing critical issues related to adolescent literacy. This report advocates for effective reading and writing instruction for struggling middle and high school students, especially those with learning disabilities (LDs). ^[1] First, it describes the adolescent literacy problem (grades 4–12), its consequences, and factors that contribute to it. Later sections address guiding principles for assessment, instruction, and professional development, concluding with recommendations for short-term and future consideration.

Literacy is a complex set of skills that comprise the interrelated processes of reading and writing required within varied sociocultural contexts. Reading requires decoding, accurate and fluent word recognition, and comprehension at the word, phrase, sentence, and text levels. Writing requires automatic letter formation and/or keyboarding, accurate and fluent spelling, sentence construction, and the ability to compose a variety of different text structures with coherence and cohesion.

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The Problem

Data specific to learning disabilities are lacking, but several useful inferences can be drawn. For example, significant numbers of adolescents in the United States do not read and/or write at levels needed to meet the demands of the 21st century. Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and writing assessments (Grigg, Donahue, & Dion, 2007; Perie, Grigg, & Donahue, 2005; Persky, Daane, & Jin, 2003) indicate, at best, little improvement in development of literacy skills for the nation's 13- and 17-year-olds, and, at worst, some lost ground in reading and writing proficiency. With respect to reading, the most recent NAEP data (Grigg et al., 2007; Perie et al., 2005) indicate that 27% of 8th and 12th grade students in the United States scored at the Below Basic level of proficiency, which NAEP defines as partial mastery of the knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at a given grade level. These students have difficulty with one or more of the following:

• literal understanding of what is read

• ability to identify specific aspects of the text that reflect overall meaning

• extension of the ideas in the text by making simple inferences

• drawing conclusions based on the text

Additionally, at the 12th-grade level, 26% of 17-year-old students do not demonstrate a fundamental ability to communicate in writing, which means they may have difficulty with skills such as the following:

• general understanding of both the writing task at hand and the audience to be addressed

• inclusion of details that support and develop the central idea of a piece

• organization that reflects consistency in topic, sequencing, and a clear introduction and conclusion

• grammar, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization accurate enough that they do not interfere with meaning

Recognition of the adolescent literacy problem has received national attention in recent years, as seen in documents such as the Alliance for Excellent Education's Reading Next (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004) and Writing Next (Graham & Perin, 2007) as well as the Center for Instruction's Academic Literacy Instruction for Adolescents (Torgesen et al., 2007). In addition, initiatives such as the Striving Readers Program (U.S. Department of Education, 2007a) are designed to raise literacy achievement levels in secondary students. The basis for this current interest is a recognition that emphasis on early reading and writing alone will likely fall short of the ultimate goal of improved literacy for all unless a similar investment is made in reading and writing instruction for older students. A wealth of evidence shows that intensive, high-quality literacy instruction can help students who are struggling build the skills they need to succeed in high school and beyond (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004).

The overall picture of adolescent literacy in the United States is not promising, but it is even more discouraging for older students with learning disabilities—the focus of this report.

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The Consequences of Literacy Problems for Adolescents With LDs

Underdeveloped literacy skills have profound consequences for students, families, and society. These effects are academic, social, emotional, and economic in nature. Students with LDs are often inadequately prepared for the academic challenges presented across the educational continuum from grade 4 through postsecondary settings.

It is reported that secondary students with LDs experience significant deficits in reading and math when compared to other students assigned to the same grade level; for example, 21% of these students are estimated to be five or more grade levels below in reading (National Center for Special Education Research, Institute of Education Science, 2003). Students with LDs and/or low literacy levels drop out of high school at higher rates than the general population. The dropout rate for this group was estimated at 17.6% as compared to 11.8% for students with no disabilities (U. S. Department of Education, 2007b). Only 13% of students with LDs, as compared to 53% of students in the general education population, have attended a 4-year postsecondary program within 2 years of leaving high school (National Center for Education Statistics, 2000).

Evidence suggests that the literacy skills of many high school graduates are insufficient for success in the workplace and society. It has been reported that low achievement in literacy correlates with high rates of poverty and unemployment (Wagner, 2000). The impact of these realities is significant to society, and the consequential socio-emotional risks for these individuals are profound.

For the older student with LDs, the opportunity for intervention decreases markedly when the student exits the public school system. Moreover, the 25 fastest growing professions have greater than average literacy demands, while the fastest declining professions have lower than average literacy demands (Barton, 2004). Students must not only possess proficiency with print but also the skills and strategies required by a digital environment. Thus, it is imperative that intervention for students with LDs begins when literacy needs are identified.

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Contributing Factors

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Guiding Principles for Assessment

The goals of assessment for the older student should be tied directly to instructional planning. This requires a team-based, comprehensive approach that often necessitates the collection of multiple forms of information, including standardized tests, qualitative analysis of student work samples, observation, and self-report measures. Currently, assessment procedures are linked primarily to the issue of eligibility for special education and related services. Assessment should lead to appropriate program planning, whether or not an individual student meets eligibility criteria for special education services.

A response-to-intervention (RTI) approach provides data for the purposes of both instructional planning and eligibility for special education services (NJCLD, 2005). In an RTI model, continuous progress monitoring throughout the assessment and instructional processes is used to gauge student progress. Curriculum-based measures, such as repeated reading probes, and traditional data, including quizzes, homework, and test grades, are used to monitor student progress in the general education classroom. If a student is progressing as expected, no instructional changes need to occur. However, if a student does not meet anticipated targets/benchmarks within the expected timeframe, the diagnostic team should recommend a shift to a tier that provides increased levels of support. Students move in and out of tiers based on the interpretation of progress monitoring data that yields critical information about program effectiveness. When students do not make expected progress, or when a referral is made to determine eligibility for special education services, a more comprehensive evaluation will be necessary to obtain additional data to support instructional planning. In such cases, the progress monitoring data can also be used to rule out the lack of appropriate instruction as the cause of the performance deficits.

Thus far, research on RTI implementation has been limited to the primary grades, and little evidence is available to guide its use at the secondary level. Although research is needed to determine the efficacy and effectiveness of RTI implementation in middle and high schools, a tier-based, progress-monitoring model provides data needed to support students with LDs in both general and special education settings.

Assessment of the literacy needs of adolescents who may have LDs should be:

• conducted by professionals who meet accepted standards in the field and who have expertise in LDs and nonbiased assessment

• conducted by professionals with expertise in working with adolescents and knowledge of adolescent learning and development characteristics

• individualized to address questions of concern related to the student's cognitive, academic, social, behavioral, motivational, and/or emotional needs

• sensitive to differing profiles at higher grade levels

  • students who remain at the early stages of literacy development

  • students who have not been identified at earlier grade levels

  • students who exhibit late-emerging problems

  • students with concomitant difficulties in language, behavior, or motivation

• designed to gather multiple sources of qualitative and quantitative information, including measures that reflect student background knowledge, readability of textbooks used in different subject areas, classroom expectations, information about the use of literacy skills outside the school setting, and the need and the level of ability to use assistive technology

• designed to provide sufficient data to identify and diagnose an LD and exclude other factors as the cause of performance problems

• integrated so that data interpretation results in a clear profile of the student's strengths and weaknesses, describes the literacy needs of the student, and provides specific recommendations that are tied to instruction, learning/behavioral supports, and transition planning

Because linguistic and cultural factors have an impact on assessment, a comprehensive evaluation for ELL students who may have LDs requires consideration of several additional factors:

• language and literacy proficiency in the student's native/primary language versus English

• developmental history of language and learning delays in the student's native/primary language versus English

• identification of cultural variables that may affect test and classroom performance

• language(s) spoken in the home, with peers, and in the community

For ELL students, comprehensive assessment also involves evaluation of language and literacy skills in both primary and secondary languages, as research indicates that students are not equally proficient across languages. Because few standardized tests of language and literacy exist in languages other than English, and English translations of tests do not yield reliable and valid results, assessment most often relies on a variety of informal procedures. Among the most useful are observational methods and dynamic assessments, which measure a student's response to instruction in a test-teach-test environment.

The results of a comprehensive assessment for adolescents with literacy problems should yield recommendations that are clear, specific, and meaningful so that teachers and other professionals can use them to inform instructional planning for accommodations/modifications, behavioral supports, and type and intensity of remediation, if indicated. Remediation should be the priority; accommodations and modifications complement, rather than substitute for, remedial instruction.

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Guiding Principles for Instruction

Instruction at the middle and secondary levels requires a continuum of services that is differentiated according to the individual learning needs of each student. ^[2] The principle of universal design addresses this need through the use of inclusive instructional strategies that benefit a broad range of learner characteristics and abilities. Within content-area classrooms, students should have access to a variety of teacher-based and learner-based strategies for mastering the critical concepts of curriculum.

Such a continuum also necessitates the infusion of high-quality, research-informed literacy instruction throughout secondary curricula to address varying levels of literacy proficiency. Students who continue to struggle, whether with decoding or comprehension, need targeted instruction at differentiated levels of intensity to address specific difficulties. This may include more explicit instruction in the general or special education setting in literacy-related foundational skills or higher level skills. Some students, particularly those with LDs, require sustained and intensive combinations of classroom instruction, remediation, and accommodations that are individualized, explicit, systematic, and relevant.

Some instructional approaches for teaching reading and writing are more effective than others. Successful instructional approaches include attention to the developmental level, language abilities, interests, motivation, and learning characteristics of the student, and address the structure and functions of language. It is generally accepted that teachers who address critical language and literacy skills through direct, systematic, sequenced lessons are effective with most students. From an instructional perspective, it is also important to distinguish between a strategy and a skill. Strategy instruction focuses on teaching an approach to a task (e.g., how a student thinks about, plans, executes, and evaluates performance of a given task). Skill instruction focuses on teaching a set of steps or procedures to accomplish a specific task.

All of the following factors should be considered when planning instruction and intervention designed to address the specific literacy needs of the adolescent student with LDs:

• Target areas that are critical to reading and writing proficiency. Key foci include decoding, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, spelling, composing, higher order language skills, metalinguistic awareness and metacognitive skills of self-regulation, and executive functioning.

• Combine strategy-based instruction/remediation with skill-based instruction. Strategies are only effective if students have the appropriate skills to carry out a given strategy. Conversely, skill learning is often insufficient to bring about generalization to other tasks.

• Teach literacy strategies within the context of content area material and discipline-specific literacy. Adolescents are asked to read volumes of materials from primary to secondary source texts that relate to various topics in the social, physical, and life sciences and mathematics. They also are asked to share what they know and think about these topics in writing. Each field has particular ways of communicating knowledge to others within and outside the discipline, and students must become adept at participating in the specialized discourse communities of scientists, mathematicians, historians, biologists, and others. Situating literacy instruction in specific disciplines can facilitate students' development of competence in reading content area texts and writing to communicate ideas associated with a content area.

• Provide clearly scaffolded and sequenced instruction/remediation that strives toward helping students become independent learners. Both modeling and informative instructional feedback are effective strategies that should be incorporated into a systematic approach for teaching critical literacy and literacy-related language skills. By knowing how to use systematic approaches, students become more adept at accessing the general curriculum, learn information more efficiently, and achieve curriculum/remediation goals successfully.

• Provide repeated opportunities to apply and generalize strategies and skills. It is often necessary to reteach skills and strategies and to provide guided practice in their functional application at higher and higher levels of complexity. For struggling learners, particularly those with LDs, it is not sufficient to simply teach a learning strategy; continued support for the use and generalization of strategies is required for real change to occur.

• Identify and incorporate strategies and tools that provide support for acquisition of critical literacy skills necessary in print and digital environments. These include, but are not limited to, the implementation and utilization of assistive technology tools and principles of universal design. Universal design involves the use of inclusive instructional strategies that benefit a broad range of learners, including those with LDs. Although universal design increases the overall responsiveness of instruction, it does not eliminate the need for specific accommodations for students with LDs.

• Actively use student performance assessment data to monitor progress, determine continuing instructional/remedial needs, and obtain information about the student's strengths and interests to incorporate into instructional planning.

Although ELLs with LDs benefit from the same interventions as their monolingual peers, they have additional specific instructional needs. These include special emphasis on cognates for word recognition, spelling, and vocabulary development, and focus on visual scaffolding (e.g., pictures, gestures, facial expressions) to facilitate reading and writing skills. In addition, it may be most productive to first teach the alphabetic principle and basic decoding skills in the student's primary language and then transfer this knowledge to the second language as a means of supporting further language and literacy development.

In summary, educators must design and deliver a continuum of differentiated services that focus on the specific needs of individual adolescents with LDs. Instruction must be guided by the results of a comprehensive assessment and informed by ongoing progress monitoring in the instructional setting.

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Guiding Principles for Professional Development

Meeting the needs of the older student with LDs is a challenging task that will require collaboration and commitment at state, district, and local levels. Professional development is pivotal for creating informed learning environments, providing quality instruction, and developing the expertise needed in schools. Practices that reflect principles outlined in an earlier NJCLD paper on professional development (1999) and consideration of the following will be critical in effecting sustained change.

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Recommendations

This NJCLD report addresses critical issues related to the literacy needs of adolescents with LDs and advocates for effective reading and writing instruction for these students. Based on the preceding discussion, NJCLD makes the following recommendations:

1. Research is needed to determine factors, instructional approaches, and combinations of approaches that affect the degree and rate of change in acquisition and application of literacy skills for adolescents with LDs within varied educational and social contexts.

2. Research on the use of RTI and other alternative approaches for adolescents with LDs must be a federal funding priority to determine the effectiveness of this model at the secondary level for the purposes of identification, remediation, accommodations, and progress monitoring.

3. Systematic studies are required to examine traditional and universal design approaches to print and digital literacy demands.

4. Longitudinal and experimental studies are critical to extend understanding of how

   • different profiles of cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural, and psychosocial characteristics of the adolescent learner with and without LDs affect learning outcomes;

   • student learning profiles change over time.

5. Assessment for adolescents with LDs must be reconceptualized as a comprehensive diagnostic process that is not solely related to eligibility but includes data that directly inform instructional planning and provide for ongoing monitoring of progress.

6. Middle and high schools may require restructuring to provide a continuum of services to meet the needs of adolescents with LDs, including instruction in the general education program, remediation, accommodations, and learning/behavioral supports.

7. Educational priorities, policies, and practices should support shared responsibility for literacy instruction between general educators and special educators.

8. Professional development plans and practices for all educators should be ongoing and should reflect the current knowledge base on adult learning.

9. Professional development should be differentiated dependent upon professional roles and responsibilities.

10. Professional preparation should reflect current science to ensure that all professionals working with adolescents with LDs possess the necessary competencies for literacy instruction.

Notes