...taught grade-level concepts in disciplines such as history, science, and mathematics. Numerous factors led to this shift in emphasis in teaching in special education. One factor was the wide array of curriculum reform movements during the 1990s that stressed that challenging content, whether in history, math, or science, should be taught so that all students, including students with disabilities, could learn essential concepts and principles. These movements were influenced by the growing realization that "specialized" remedial programs, particularly at the middle and high school levels, almost invariably stressed "basic" academic skills at the expense of serious exposure to conceptually demanding material.

Another factor influential in curriculum access was the emerging body of research on strategy instruction and procedural facilitators. This body of research demonstrated that poor reading skills did not have to restrict students from accessing challenging content. When provided with intense and explicit instruction in how to strategically approach the learning of challenging material, these students could learn to express complex ideas in a coherent fashion (Baker, Gersten, & Scanlon 2002; Englert, Raphael, Anderson, Anthony, & Stevens, 1991).

RESEARCH ON PROVIDING ACCESS TO THE GENERAL CURRICULUM IN SOCIAL STUDIES

Observational research has consistently documented that, although students with learning disabilities (LD) often receive social studies instruction in general education classrooms, they typically do not learn very much in these classes (Zigmond, Wolery, Meng, Flumer, & Bean, 1994). Their minimal learning can be explained, in part, by the fact that traditional teaching of history relies heavily on students being able to independently read course textbooks. Most students with LD read grade level material with extreme difficulty, and these problems are exacerbated when the text is technical or abstract and the vocabulary is complex, as it is in content-area textbooks. When Zigmond et al. interviewed students with LD after social studies lessons that relied heavily on textbook reading, traditional lecture, and whole class discussion methods, they found students with LD demonstrated, at best, superficial knowledge of the key concepts that were demonstrated, explained, and reviewed by the teacher. In examining instruction in these classrooms, Zigmond et al. observed that, "students with learning disabilities ... were selectively attentive, often focusing on an extraneous part of a lesson or explanation. [They were] easily confused and [overly] Concrete in their understandings" (p. 14). Teachers also did little to ensure that students focused on core concepts, and the lesson structure itself did little to engage the attention of these students.

Passe and Beattie (1994) found that when social studies teachers tried to make "adaptations" for students with LD, they were often of little help to the students. For example, the major "adaptation" was to provide peer tutors to help Students with LD do better on tests. Although this adaptation resulted in slight increases in test scores, the focus of the tutoring seemed to be limited to the memorization of factual content. It did not address higher-level concepts, such as the meaning of events or key relationships.

Passe and Beattie (1994) also found that, when teachers "individualized" academic demands for students with LD, they usually did so by lowering standards. The new standards invariably stressed the memorization of names and dates. The authors observed, for example, "when classroom peers were expected to analyze the characteristics of various nations, special education students merely had to learn to locate the nations on a map" (p. 230). In summary, special education students have received superficial access to topics in the general curriculum, but this access is rarely meaningful and it rarely covers the key concepts that students without disabilities are expected to learn.

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CURRICULUM ACCESS

To foster meaningful access to challenging content for students with LD, we focused on developing curriculum content that would not require strong or even average reading skills for accessibility. This entailed the serious use of material other than grade-level textbooks, which almost always are too difficult for special education students to independently read and understand. A large body of research suggests that Various strategies and procedures based on text structures would be useful to these students in terms of comprehension of text and understanding of course content (Baker et al., 2002; Ferretti, MacArthur, & Okolo, 2001; Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001; Graham, Harris, MacArthur, & Schwartz, 1991).

To increase accessibility, we hypothesized that instruction should be highly interactive and socially mediated. For example, student achievement in reading and mathematics is enhanced when they have opportunities to work in heterogeneous dyads during parts of a lesson and are provided with clear structures to guide peer interactions (Elbaum, Vaughn, Hughes, & Moody, 1999; Graham et. al., 1991). Taken together, these studies suggest that some type of peer-mediated instruction might significantly enhance the learning of more complex content for students with LD. It might also be beneficial for averageability students. We also reasoned that students would learn more if the teacher-directed portions of the lesson were highly interactive, providing the teacher with many opportunities to informally assess and monitor student understanding on an ongoing basis, and providing students with opportunities to articulate their understanding of the content.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

We believed that students with LD could learn history if (a) instruction included comprehensible and accessible materials (rather than sole reliance on traditional textbooks), and (b) incorporated instructional delivery strategies that provided numerous opportunities for students to interact with peers and the teacher during the lesson (rather than heavy reliance on lectures and whole class discussions). We targeted history because the principles and relationships explored in history are quintessentially human and of potential interest to virtually all students, regardless of reading ability.

The first phase of the project involved development and extensive field-testing of the curricula materials and instructional delivery practices that might succeed with students with LD (Gersten, 2005; Gersten, Baker, Smith-Johnson, Peterson, & Dimino, 2003). We chose the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) as the topic; this period of American history transformed the nature of American society in profound ways. Our goal was for students to learn key events, the meaning of these events within a historical period, and to begin to understand the greater significance of these events in contemporary society. We wanted to evaluate our approach using rigorous research methodology: randomized controlled trials (Shadish, Cook, & Campbell, 2002). We decided that using a traditional control group (i.e., a group taught the same content but using traditional texts and teaching methods) would not make sense since we knew that virtually none of the LD students could read a grade-appropriate text.

We therefore set up a more stringent comparison condition. Students in the comparison group received the identical curriculum content as students in the experimental group, but the teacher did not utilize the interactive instructional delivery procedures we developed and adapted. Thus, the randomized controlled trials did not evaluate the curriculum per se, but evaluated whether delivering that content in these specific ways increased learning in inclusive settings.

DESIGN

Students with and without LD were matched on disability status and oral reading fluency, and then randomly assigned to the experimental teaching condition or the comparison condition. The teachers were counterbalanced across conditions. Each teacher taught the experimental condition once and the comparison condition once, thus controlling for teacher effects. The teacher selected to teach the experimental condition in the fall in one school taught the comparison condition in the winter in the second school. The other teacher taught the comparison condition in the fall and the experimental condition in the winter. In all of the classrooms approximately half of the students were LD and half were students of average ability.

METHOD

PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING

Students. Seventy-six middle school students (47 seventh graders and 29 eighth graders) participated in the study. Thirty-six of these students were students with disabilities (33 students with LD and 3 classified as Other Health Impaired (OHI), hereafter referred to as the LD sample). These students are typically included in general education classes for most of their instructional day, especially for classes in subjects such as social studies or science (Wagner & Blackorby, 2002). For the purpose of this article, we prefer to use the term learning disabilities to refer to this sample, since neither LD nor attention deficit disorder are clearly defined and two characteristics common to both groups are reading difficulties and problems with organizational strategy. Both of these characteristics create potential problems in history instruction. We refer to all of...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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