SPECIAL NEEDS FOR STUDENTS
WITH MODERATE AND SEVERE LEARNING PROBLEMS
Michael Jensen
Students with significant learning problems often pose a challenge to
special education teachers. This challenge can be ameliorated by reorienting
instruction from the teaching to the learning realm, meeting students at their
specific cognitive levels and allowing typical and crucial target behaviors to
emerge through conceptualization instead of teaching those target behaviors as
forms of pattern regurgitation.
The foundation for this practice is an understanding of Piaget’s four stages
of intellectual development. These four stages are sensorimotor, preoperational,
concrete and formal (Piaget, 1952). With this in mind, assessment should begin
with determining where a student falls on this spectrum, not on what a student
can do.
Observing how a student interacts with the world determines at which
level meaning should be assigned during instruction. A very cognitively low
student can easily be identified because their motor movements and utterances
contain little or no meaning. Their actions are without function, lacking basic
concepts like existence or intention.
Once a cognitive level is established, it is effective to assign meaning at
that specific level. For students at a sensorimotor or early preoperational
cognitive level, a teacher should engage them on a “here-and-now” basis. The
goal here is to provide the student with sufficient overlapping of perceivable
patterns so that these patterns may create conceptual understanding of the
surrounding world.
A specific educational technique appropriate for this level of learner is
hand-over-hand instruction. This is practiced so that the student has
opportunities to form motor shapes through their visual learning system. These
visual-motor patterns are needed so that the student can overlap them enough to
form basic, sensorimotor-visual concepts. What exceptional learners need above
all is someone to develop such concepts. Developing student conceptual
understanding offers a greater level of flexibility and permanence.
It is often assumed that linguistically complex utterances such as the
recitation of the alphabet indicate student conceptual understanding. In reality
such utterances often mean that the mind is engaged on a low, pattern-based
level. This level does not require one’s understanding of words in order to speak
them. Species other than human are able to memorize patterns, such as dogs,
horses or parrots, yet they have no higher-order thinking abilities.
Teaching concepts by using stick figures is effective at all cognitive levels,
but is particularly useful for students at preoperational levels of thinking. This is
because these pictures place students within a specific visual context as an
independent actor, or “agent.” The highly personal and contextualized visual
cognitive style of stick figures is in stark contrast to the very low-context, auditory
nature of the English language. If a teacher bases their instruction on this highcontext learning realm, the student will be able to respond in meaning-engaged
ways which are often absent from direct auditory-based language instruction.
In the case of hand-over-hand exercises, the student’s extremely accessible
visual-motor learning system is being stimulated as they act as an extension of
the teacher’s agent. This method, like drawing stick figures, helps establish a
student as an independent entity acting in the world. As this agency develops, a
student becomes more competent in agent-action-object interactions, as well as
develops their socialization skills through mutually recognized consciousness,
agent-to-agent.
Assigning meaning in the context discussed is specifically about learners
developing as social and cognitive beings through other people’s assignment of
meaning to children’s motor responses to sensory input (Arwood, 2011).
Assigning meaning is initially about developing a learner’s sense of agency so that
they are able to develop social relationships and take meaningful action in the
world. More advanced future conceptualization is dependent on this foundational
sense of agency, and is thus what students with moderate to severe learning
difficulties need to be successful.
REFERENCES
Arwood, E. L. (2011). Language function: an introduction to pragmatic
assessment and intervention for higher order thinking and better literacy.
London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Piaget, Jean (1952) The Origins of Intelligence in Children. New York:
International University Press