Literacy Instruction for People with Mental Retardation: Historical Highlights and Contemporary Analysis

By D. S. Katims. Education and Training in Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, 2000

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The story of the treatment of people with mental retardation dates back to the beginning of recorded history. However, documented attempts at systematic literacy instruction, including efforts to teach reading, writing, and spelling to individuals with mental retardation, is a relatively recent phenomenon. This article begins with a brief review of historical highlights of literacy education for people with mental retardation over the last two hundred years. The second part of the article investigates the current state of literacy instruction for people with mental retardation as represented in a sample of contemporary professional textbooks in special education pertaining to descriptions of academic characteristics, assessment procedures, and instructional procedures. Movement away from highly sequenced, hierarchical, and isolated skill and practice routines toward more contextualized and holistic reading orientations for people with mental retardation is discussed.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/144d2d0c78dd51b87ae34dff6e1b8c3575031946

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Citations in the corpus

Enhancing Phonological Awareness and Letter Knowledge in Preschool Children with Down Syndrome (2006, methodology): “Yet traditionally, when reading has been advocated for children with Down syndrome, they have been taught using a visually based approach; that is, learning to read words by sight through visual rote learning (Conners, 1992; Farrell & Elkins, 1994; Katims, 2000; Singh & Singh, 1986).”
Training Teachers to Follow a Task Analysis to Engage Middle School Students With Moderate and Severe Developmental Disabilities in Grade-Appropriate Literature (2007, background): “Qualitative research, including content analyses of textbooks (Katims, 2000) and ethnographic studies of children’s school experiences (Kliewer, 1998), has revealed a consistent lack of focus on reading for this population.”
Evaluation of the Effectiveness of an Early Literacy Program for Students with Significant Developmental Disabilities (2008, background): “Qualitative research including content analyses of textbooks (Katims, 2000) and ethnographic studies of children’s school experiences (Kliewer, 1998) reveals, a consistent lack of focus on reading for this population—who are probably the least likely to learn to read without carefully planned,…”
Teaching Elementary Students with Multiple Disabilities to Participate in Shared Stories (2008, background): “Qualitative researchers found a lack of focus on reading for this population (Katims, 2000; Kliewer, 1998) and theorized that there might even be some cultural expectations that this population could not benefit from reading instruction (Kliewer, Biklen, & Kasa-Hendrickson, 2006).”
Research on Reading Instruction for Individuals with Significant Cognitive Disabilities (2006, background): “Qualitative research including content analyses of textbooks (Katims, 2000) and ethnographic studies of children’s school experiences (Kliewer, 1998) reveals a consistent lack of focus on reading.”
Comprehensive reading instruction for students with intellectual disabilities: Findings from the first three years of a longitudinal study (2010, background): “unlikely to learn to read by fully processing print; rather, efforts have focused on teaching students to memorize specific lists of words (Katims, 2000).”
Using Systematic Instruction to Teach Decoding Skills to Middle School Students with Moderate Intellectual Disabilities (2006, unknown): “The National Reading Panel (NRP) (2000) identiﬁed the ﬁve “big ideas” in reading as phonological awareness, alphabetic principle, ﬂuency, vocabulary knowledge, and comprehension.”
Creating Access to the General Curriculum With Links to Grade-Level Content for Students With Significant Cognitive Disabilities (2007, background): “Qualitative research including content analyses of textbooks (Katims, 2000) and ethnographic studies of children’s school experiences (Kliewer & Biklen, 2001) reveal a consistent lack of focus on reading.”