Kayla Project 3 IDS 100 fnalllll 454545 PDF

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Special Education and Learning Disabilities through Social and Natural Science Lenses Kayla A Pierpaoli IDS 100 February 16th, 2020

Introduction  This project will explore the topic of special education and learning disabilities through the lenses of social science and natural science.  I chose this topic because I am pursuing a degree in Psychology and I find the topic to be most related to the work that I will do in the future.  I am hoping to learn through this project more about the everyday challenges that children and students with learning disabilities face, and how special education helps them overcome these things.  I was also curious to learn what types of precursors there are both in utero and in life, to learning disabilities, and what can be done to potentially prevent them in the first place.

Learning Disabilities and Special Education through Social Science  Students with learning disabilities statistically read at a much lower grade level than they should.  Audio texts, reciprocal teaching and cooperative learning are different methods instituted to help children with learning disabilities better comprehend what they are learning.  Some schools special education departments implement a program called Cognitive Strategies to help students with reading retention.  Students are given tools at work, but involvement with parents outside the school has been a known issue.  In the Social Science lens, there were first hand accounts and observations of different teaching methods and how things improved for students, and what teachers thought about different methods had been journaled about after each class.

Learning Disabilities and Special Education through Natural Science  There are several different predecessors to special education that can be found both while in utero and in early infancy.  Babies who are delivered naturally are most likely to have learning disabilities, followed by cesarean and forceps.  Children whose mothers were placed on bed rest, who took medicine through pregnancy, and experienced bleeding while pregnant were shown to be at higher risk for eventual learning disabilities.  Low birth weights, jaundice, seizures and being entered into neonatal units in early infancy are also shown as increasing likelihood of these disabilities.  The Natural Science lens is viewed through collecting data on pregnancies and early childhood history of 200 children now between the ages of 8 and 12 who have been diagnosed with an array of learning disabilities.

Convergence  The similarities between these two lenses and my topic go beyond the science element. o Both lenses look at the everyday lives of children with disabilities and aim to fix them. o Both articles discuss practices either in childhood or before that worsen the issues faced by children with learning disabilities. o Both lenses required data to be collected and investigated to grow better answers. o Both articles discuss the importance of special education and coping strategies once the disabilities are uncovered.

Divergence  The Social Science and Natural Science lenses explore different parts of the problem: o Social Science focuses more on the issues in school age children, where they can see improvement and how to propel that improvement by changing the learning environment where as the social science lens looks at the earlier development of this condition and what factors influence these things. o The Natural Science looks more at the human brain and individual factors that contribute to the problem whereas the Social Science lens tends to look for ideas outside of the person on how their life can be bettered\ and or hindered by teachers, programs and taught habits and parental involvement or lack thereof.

Both Lenses  Looking at Special Education and Learning Disabilities through both of these lenses shows a very clear issue in both our prenatal care and educational system care of children and how that can potentially contribute to these issues. We can do more to prevent and help children overcome existing issues by helping them further their learning or learn differently. However, from the research that was read it is clear to me, that change and better training and education for out mothers and educators on these topics will be important moving forward to address these issues.

Further Exploration  To further explore this topic I will seek answers to questions related to the early development of children with learning disabilities and the genetic factors and other predecessors that might exist that relate to them.  Are mothers that are under higher stress levels more likely to have a child with special needs? o Prenatal Factors, Factors in learning disabilities, genetic factors in learning disabilities

 If caught early, could children with learning disabilities learn to function at their normal grade level? o Special education strategies, early childhood development and learning disabilities, special schools, cognitive strategies

Conclusion Through my research I learned that there are very many deciding factors in the growth and development of a baby that can lead to learning disabilities. Once these children are in school there are a variety of tools that can be utilized by them or their teachers to try and keep them on track and comprehending at a normal level, however most children with learning disabilities don’t. Moving forward I would love to find out other factors in keeping these children closer to the learning curves they are supposed to be meeting at their age and what types of special education could be used to accomplish that & what other prenatal and early infancy factors will possibly contribute to these disabilities. I would like to do that by utilizing some of the other information that I may not have gotten as into in the other lenses of social science, by forming new questions and investigating new scholarly articles.

References 1.

Cowden, P. A. (2012). Cognitive strategies for students with mild learning disabilities. Education, 133(1), 151+. 2. Jain, R., & Pandey, N. (2015). Specific predictive factors in children with learning disability: A qualitative study. Indian Journal of Health and Wellbeing, 6(12), 1215–1219...