FOCUS ON EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN is published monthly except June, July, and August as a service to those concerned with mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed children. Subscriptions rates, $9.50 per year.
Curriculum development for the educable mentally retarded child is emerging from the dark ages. This emergence, although still in its infancy, is significant. An influential factor in the growing concern to provide meaningful curriculum materials for EMR children has been the results of studies to determine the efficacy of special class placement for these children.For the most part the efficacy studies have provided ambiguous results. Kirk ( 1964) concluded from his review of such studies that the positive or negative values of special class placement for EMR children has not yet been demonstrated. Two recent efficacy studies warrant examination to help focus on problems that have developed from assessing special class placement.Goldstein, Moss, and Jordan ( 1965) attempted to overcome deficits present in other studies by examining the interrelatedness of program, methodology, teacher competence, and subject variables. Although some of the results of this research produced equivocal findings, the study did demonstrate that a socially oriented curriculum and inductive teaching procedure produced significant results in achievement in language arts, arithmetic, and social knowledge favoring the experimental subjects. The authors concluded that these results could be attributed to a meaningful curriculum ( Illinois Plan;Goldstein and Seigle, 1958) and to inductive teaching procedures. Previous efficacy studies rarely considered the influence of specified teaching plans and procedures as factors worthy of study.The Illinois study led logically to a second investigation conducted in New Jersey ( Goldstein, Mischio, and Minskoff, 1969). In this study teachers were given training in using social learning concepts as a basis for their teaching. In addition teachers were trained to correlate traditional skill areas with social learning activities. To effect this type of programming in special classes for the EMR, consultants met extensively with teachers in their classrooms to plan and evaluate curriculum efforts. The authors of this paper served as consultants to that project.Our experience in working with teachers throughout the study indicated that our best counsel occurred when questions specifically related to problems of curriculum content were explored. Early in the project we found that our conferences with teachers were vague and often related to problems of classroom management and discipline. At best these conferences were based on random problems. Although teachers were equipped with the Illinois Plan and had been trained to create units I.
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