Students with disabilities are served by both special and general educators, yet teachers often feel unprepared to meet the needs of these students in their classrooms. Using data from a nationally representative survey, we examined the sufficiency of teachers’ access to supports available for meeting the needs of students with high-incidence disabilities, their access to development opportunities, and the sources teachers used to access interventions. We explored differences in teachers’ experiences by grade band, service delivery model, and teacher preparation model. We found teachers of students with disabilities rated the sufficiency of access to supports between somewhat insufficient and somewhat sufficient, with the lowest ratings for planning/release time and training and information. Teachers reported greater rates of access to collaboration than professional development. Colleagues were sources for resources related to academic interventions and administrators were sources for nonacademic intervention resources. There were few significant differences in these results by teacher characteristics.
Students' explanations of their mathematical thinking and conclusions have become a greater part of the assessment landscape in recent years. With a sample of 71 fourth-grade students at risk for mathematics learning disabilities, we investigated the relation between student accuracy in comparing the magnitude of fractions and the quality of students' explanations of those comparisons, as well as the relation between those measures and scores on a criterion test: released fraction items from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. We also considered the extent to which reasoning and language contribute to the prediction. Results indicated a significant moderate correlation between accuracy and explanation quality. Commonality analyses indicated that explanation quality accounts for little variance in National Assessment of Educational Progress scores beyond what is accounted for by traditional measures of magnitude understanding. Implications for instruction and assessment are discussed.
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