Despite the increasing necessity for needs assessments in a variety of fields, much confusion still prevails on how to conduct such assessments successfully. This book is a practical guide to that end. The authors first introduce a three-phase model - preassessment, assessment and postassessment - to clarify the distinctions between the needs of primary service recipients and the people and resources that exist because of them. They go on to describe methods appropriate for gathering data for assessing needs and for causal analysis. The presentation of the framework, the coverage of several approaches for analyzing data, the balanced description of qualitative and quantitative methodologies and the multiple case studies and examples will enable students and practitioners to conduct needs assessment in fields such as health care, psychology, sociology, education, public administration and urban planning.
One of the current controversies in education concerns the inclusion in the classroom of both mildly and severely disabled students. The authors of this practical guide detail the rationale behind inclusion, discuss its advantages and disadvantages, and provide guidance for administrators, teachers, students and parents.
A companion volume to ''Children with Special Needs'', this volume covers the assessment of and procedure for young adults who have greater difficulties in learning than the majority of people their age. Further and higher education institutions have now been taken out of LEA jurisdiction, and this book provides a detailed guide to the most recent ......
Visions for the Education of African American Children
In her highly acclaimed work Black Children, Janice Hale argued that the difficulties many African American children have in school result from differences in learning style that are deeply rooted in African American culture. Now, in Unbank the Fire, Hale asks a new question: What sorts of extraordinary measures are needed to overcome these ......
`Throughout the book general points are given a concrete illustration by reference to specific examples of special education research. The breadth of reference is a strength of the text, with a bias towards work on deafness and hearing impairment, in which Mertens has a particular interest. Wherever such illustrations are offered, the book comes alive.... there are few sources for a wide range of short accounts of examples of the practice of research in special education. This short book is a convenient and well-organized addition to them' - Division of Educational and Child Psychology Newsletter This book explores ways to adapt research methods from other disciplines to the special education context and provides the reader with a framework for critically analyzing and conducting research in areas where people with disabilities live, learn and work. Identifying people with disabilities as heterogenous cultural groups, and including such disabilities as blindness, learning difficulties and deafness, the authors discuss the implications for planning, conducting and writing research. Topics examined include: the development of research questions; identification of special education populations; sampling issues; appropriate quantitative and qualitative techniques; interpretation issues in data analysis; and directions for future research such as early intervention and school-linked services.
This guide shows how school personnel can use evaluation to assess programme appropriateness, effectiveness, quality and improvement of special education programmes. The authors suggest practical ways in which evaluation can benefit teacher and student. They illustrate: how to document needs and support requests for resources; how to reveal programme strengths and weaknesses and make informed, effective decisions on the need for change; how to compare promising programme alternatives by pre-testing and collecting data on a sample basis and determining effectiveness before widespread implementation; and how to diagnose aspects of programmes that must be improved to meet legal or external requirements. Non-technical terminology is used throughout.
This field-tested curriculum, serving learners from kindergarten through age 21, is designed to prepare students with disabilities to thrive in the real world.
