Abstract
There are many students worldwide who have different disabilities. These students are taught using several teaching strategies to ensure efficient learning. One of the strategies used worldwide is SRSD which means self-regulated strategy development, discovered by Karen and Steve Graham. The SRSD is a theoretical teaching strategy that fills the gap in writing among students with disabilities. It is a system for writing teaching that incorporates self-regulation. Many middle-school children find writing to be a complex and challenging skill. As a result, teachers must devote significant effort and implement evidence-based instructional methods while teaching writing. This paper focuses on a fifteen-year-old male with a language and speech impairment. The paper further focuses on how the SRSD strategy will impact the child in improving his learning skills.
Keywords: SRSD, disability, and summary writing.
Introduction
Brain bench academy in the urban region of south East was the setting for my fieldwork. Approximately 60% of the students are African American, and 40% are Hispanic, making for a varied student population. Only 2% of the school’s diverse student body comprises English students, and 83% of the school’s students come from low-income families, with girls surpassing boys by a ratio of 53 to 47 percent. Ten students with impairments were in the general education classroom where I worked. An all-day push-and-pull from the available education teacher occurs in the school. My primary fieldwork case is a male first-grader who was found with a Speech – Language Impairment in the middle of the year. He seems to enjoy school because he enjoys spending time with his best friend. He enjoys performing arts like art, music, dance, and storytelling.
He says English, music, and art & craft are the three subjects he enjoys most at school. He enjoys art since it allows him to express his tastes through drawing. Because he is such a happy kid, he enjoys reading humorous stories. The summer holiday is when he spends most of his time with his grandma, who tells him stories that he finds fascinating. He also claimed to have completed the summer reading assignment assigned to him. Although he stated that he enjoys stickers and coloring, he did not express any objections. Our brief encounter suggests that he is polite and good at socializing.
Task management, or emulating the writing process, is an additional SRSD writing method that can benefit children with impairments. Students with disabilities can be distracted when writing (Liberty & Conderman, p.9, 2018). In their summary, they may be out of date.Making a strategy with the pupils to complete the writing can help teach them task management. Assessing the students for approximately long they believe it will take to complete the assignment is an effective way to get this information. As a result, the instructor and student can work together to devise strategies for staying focused and free of interruptions. To keep students focused, good rewarding behavior with positive feedback is essential.
Writing is a skill that relies heavily on one’s ability to comprehend what they are writing and ensure that it makes sense. A self-evaluation is a valuable tool for struggling writers who want to improve their summaries and writing (Liberty & Conderman,p.7. 2018). This method can be taught to pupils by having them practice it with you as you move through their work. A summary of the questions disabled students can use to guide their work helps them assess their progress and ensures that they have addressed all relevant components. With enough repetition, self-evaluation can become ingrained as a habit.
Learner needs
His reading comprehension, reading polysyllabic words, reading fluently and accurately, and his ability to recognize sight words are all in question, according to my observations. He also has difficulty concentrating because he is easily distracted and self-sufficient (Liberty & Conderman, p.5, 2018). The IEP indicated that he participates effectively in group work and can stay on target for up to five minutes. When provided phonics teaching directly, he will be capable of decoding unknown words with varied digraphs and blends,” according to her IEP. Although he has trouble decoding polysyllabic words, formal and informal test evidence suggests that the kid is reading and understanding at about the middle of the second-grade level. He has improved his fluency in English and is now at or near grade level with the help of SRSD, which enhances how a disabled student approaches things.
Observations reveal that he requires reminders to keep him focused on the task at hand since he has trouble maintaining attention for the length of time expected of a third grader. He is prone to straying off subject or singing in the midst of a class (Saddler et al.p.13, 2019). He has the most difficulty finishing assigned tasks on time and is frequently admonished for wasting time on non-educational websites while he is supposed to be working on assignments. Without on-task concentrating prompts to direct his work, he finds it difficult to focus during his free time during remote learning. However, even though he is being prompted and controlled by the school’s online monitoring platform, he cannot still be independently accountable.
According to this case study, students with disabilities can benefit from using the SRSD technique to write summaries. According to what I have seen and what I believe the kid knows, putting this plan into action will significantly improve the areas where he now struggles (Saddler et al.P.12, 2019). Establishing one’s own practice and reflecting on it is vital. Teachers need to give them time and space for students to build on what they have learned and determine their development. In addition, the student should be able to evaluate their performance on the assignment and make adjustments as necessary to improve their grade. Students should be asked to identify any obstacles they encountered, distractions, or other areas of difficulty they discovered during their studies.
Literature review
Self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) is an instructional approach to help students improve their academic skills and self-regulation (lee et al., p.9, 2022). It is an intervention that allows students to reinforce self-regulation skills and promote independent learning (Whitley, 2020). It can be well accepted that for any instructor, one of the most significant challenges is helping students develop habits that make them self-directed learners. That challenge becomes even louder for children with disabilities. SRSD is an approach suitable for writing instructions for students with disabilities. The intervention integrates multiple instructional components through a self-regulatory process that helps empower students. Hence the goal is to keep the students within instructions that will enable them to write and also ensure that they stay motivated. SRSD writing strategy can be used by students with disabilities in the following manner to write summaries.
First, the SRSD writing strategy can be used to write summaries for students with disabilities by first developing background knowledge through task analysis. Often, students will start writing without understanding what they should do. It can be frustrating when students veer off the topic and begin descending into issues that are not essentially what they have been told to do (LDAOeng, 2017). Therefore, to help students stick to the summary, the instructor should understand what they think the outset of the writing task is. They should be able to read the instructions aloud and, in their own words, explain what the assignment means and, in this case, summarize. The students should also be able to underline the critical part of the instructions, such as emphasizing the word.
The second SRSD strategy is to assist the students in setting goals. Even though the student might understand the assignment, they might start without a purpose for it. Students understanding of the setting of a goal will help monitor them. It will also be a point of motivation for them as they will see that their work is productive and worthwhile. This strategy can be instilled by explaining to the students that having a clear end goal will make their work more accessible (Whitley, 2020). Such purposes can be to write a certain number of words for a specific summary. It is essential to understand that self-regulating and self-monitoring skills can be taught at this stage as they emphasize the essence of effort.
The third SRSD writing strategy that can help children with disabilities is task management or modeling the writing process. It is common for students with disabilities to get sidetracked during writing. They may not be timely in their summary (lee et al., p.4, 2022). Therefore, task management can be instilled by making a plan with the students to complete the writing. This can be done by asking the students how long they think they will be done. Then the instructor can also define with the student how to avoid distractions and interruptions from the other students. Positive reinforcement is significant for reinforcing good behavior that promotes concentration.
Self-evaluation and memorization will promote a student to become a skilled writer. An essential part of writing is understanding what one is writing and ensuring that it is making relevant sense. Writers who are struggling can achieve good summary and writing by self-evaluating their work. This strategy can be taught by practicing with the students when they stop and go through the piece (Lee et al., p.3, 2022). Students with disabilities can be guided by specific questions that entail a summary, ensuring they can evaluate their work and see whether they have tackled all the necessary parts. With this practice, self-evaluation can attach as a habit with repeated practice.
Through self-reinforcement and support can also help students with disabilities. Showing support to the students as a teacher is essential in ensuring that they implement all the above strategies (Whitley p.4, 2020). Unsurprisingly, students with a disability finding it hard to write will also dislike getting engaged in any form of writing. For instance, making simple mistakes may end up being obsessed over them. Making many mistakes can be overwhelming, and the adverse outcomes can be overwhelming. Therefore, the instructor should be keen to praise students on the different milestones they achieve in their writing. For instance, for a specific word count achieved, they can complement them or their conservative nature within the summary.
Establishing independent practice and reflection is necessary (Whitley, p.6, 2020). The teacher should give space to students to ensure that they can establish the learned strategies and deduce their progress. This will help the instructor decide the points to perform a booster on the approach to reinforce more on having good summaries. The student should also be able to reflect on their assignment and how well they think they did. The instructor should ask the students the kind of roadblocks that they believe they hit or the distractions or any other place they experienced difficulty in. this way, the student can make the right changes.
To conclude, the SRSD is a valuable strategy that will help ease how students with disabilities get to connect with others through written form. Fully understanding what is to be answered entails questions that are well understood and therefore allow accessible summary taking. Goals form a critical path in which progress is witnessed and should be achieved.
Student data
Assessments, observations, and post-assessments were used to track the growth and progress of the focal learner. Benchmark assessments focused on recognizing students’ strengths in reading, including decoding polysyllabic words and identifying significant themes in texts at grade level for the students tested in the study. Decoding CVC words with 70% accuracy, words of one vowel sound with 30% accuracy, and polysyllabic word translating with 60% accuracy were the results of the benchmark exam (Saddler et al.P.11, 2019). When he encountered words with more than a vowel only but one vowel sound, the boy had difficulty comprehending them. There was some difficulty in combining and interpreting the word’s vowel sounds, even though he was familiar with the letter sounds.
Using a hands-on approach, we helped the kid actively engage in decoding words by highlighting words with double consonants and then breaking them down into segments. After four weeks of on-the-spot feedback and coaching, the target learner was able to decode CVC words with an accuracy of 85%, words with a vowel sound of 60%, and polysyllabic words with an accuracy of 79.9% on the post-assessment (Saddler et al.P.4, 2019). The boy’s statistics guided our small group intervention as we began our training on reading comprehension.
Simply put, he scored a Late 1 for information text and a Mid 2 for literature, which is much below the grade level expected. Read aloud was introduced in April to assist him in improving his fluency and comprehension of the written word (Saddler et al.P.5, 2019). To urge him to read and participate in book discussions, ‘Control the game’ was employed as an outreach and involvement strategy. A recent report card shows that the kid is progressing toward our initial learning objective. The boy’s highlighting of crucial elements to assist his discovery of a text’s central concept is on par with what is expected at the second-grade level. He can recognize only one or two examples to substantiate his interpretation of the text.
Findings
According to observations concerning SRSD, teachers should utilize specific teaching methods to help students develop their writing and other academic skills. Several strategies can be used depending on the subject matter and the age (Saddler et al.P.3, 2019). Teachers can, for example, have their students work individually with a specific method to help them prepare and brainstorm tale ideas. Students are frequently given mnemonic devices by their teachers to help them remember to incorporate all of the necessary phases and ingredients when executing a technique. Instructors demonstrate the approach’s application and the ability to self-monitor using the strategy and then guide learners on how to do the same in their own lives. Students are then tested to see if they can recall and correctly implement their learned approach.
The traditional teaching methods, such as presentations and worksheets, may make it difficult for kids to learn, according to new research that shows that labeling students as “learning challenged” or “not proficient readers” is often wrong. Students’ fluency and comprehension will increase if more active participation is implemented (Saddler et al. P.7., 2019). learners to discuss the reading, write summaries or reviews, or perform crucial features from the text will allow them to stop, reflect, and execute their learning.
Throughout my small range of learners, I used active engagement to target students’ learning needs and help them close their academic gaps. We established the primary idea utilizing supporting essential details (Saddler et al.P.4, 2019). We also used their descriptive language and reading comprehension. The “relationship between classroom training and academic accomplishment” is reconciled when students actively participate in class. A session in which students are actively involved tends to drive them to read for understanding and connect to their personal experiences, which improves their attention spans and concentration levels.
Self-regulation skills are taught to students in the early levels of SRSD, some of which are included within the UDL milestones. After watching professors or peers set goals and identify their work, students would be allowed to do the same. Students then take part in creating challenging yet reasonable objectives and also determine when to employ scaffolds, including checklists or charts, as they develop their ability to execute these tasks.
Discussion
Teachers should use a similar SRSD checkpoint to “optimize learning tasks’ appropriateness, value, and authenticity” in a writing unit. Teachers can model socially relevant writing activities, for instance, “Should children your age be permitted to engage in social media?” during the “model it” stage of SRSD training for the young boy (Hashey et al.P.15, 2020). Students may be asked to select a side to an authentic, important subject and speak with real audiences at the end of SRSD education. For the child in this case study, this could be a question of a dispute in the town about whether or not to fund the development of a park.
If this is the case, he could write his essay in a classroom or local newspaper or email it to local officials who can use it to get money for a skate park (Hashey et al.P.19, 2020). A UDL-informed classroom can benefit from SRSD instruction by allowing teachers to recognize the critical role that student engagement plays in their students’ academic success and by providing an additional chance for learners to put their newly gained writing skills to use in action and expression that is relevant to their own cultures. Teachers provide richer circumstances for their students’ learning and writing practice.
Students should have several opportunities to observe and understand information when writing instruction is performed inside a UDL framework. UDL’s “many forms of representation” checkpoint, for example, underlines the significance of emphasizing patterns, essential features, and significant ideas (Hashey et al.P.8, 2020). All students can benefit from memorization charts and visual representations that help them remember essential concepts.
Conclusion
Finding the best place to begin dealing with the many obstacles pupils confront while writing is a significant problem for teachers. Teachers can help students improve their writing by using both UDL and SRSD to recognize the complexity of writing and the parallel difficulty in addressing struggling writers’ various and multiple needs. As a starting point, teachers should use the UDL framework to guide their education, lowering the obstacles experienced by students who are struggling with their writing. However, SRSD instruction provides students with expert instruction, defined by explicit models and frequent feedback. Every student deserves the best possible conditions to excel in their writing assignments. To help students develop the information, abilities, strategic actions, and motivation they need to succeed in writing, teachers who plan and implement SRSD writing instruction in a classroom informed by UDL, create the groundwork.
Reference
Hashey, A., Miller, K., & Foxworth, L. (2020). Combining Universal Design for Learning and Self-Regulated Strategy Development to Bolster Writing Instruction. Intervention In School And Clinic, 56(1), 22-28. https://doi.org/10.1177/1053451220910733
Liberty, L., & Conderman, G. (2018). Using the Self-regulated Strategy Development Model to Support Middle-level Writing. The Clearing House: A Journal Of Educational Strategies, Issues, And Ideas, 91(3), 118-123. https://doi.org/10.1080/00098655.2018.142630
Saddler, B., Asaro-Saddler, K., Moeyaert, M., & Cuccio-Slichko, J. (2019). Teaching Summary Writing to Students with Learning Disabilities via Strategy Instruction. Reading &Amp; Writing Quarterly, 35(6), 572-586. https://doi.org/10.1080/10573569.2019.1600085
long. (2017, September 27). Combining Writing and Self-Regulation Strategies: The SRSD Approach – LD@school. LD@School. https://www.ldatschool.ca/srsd/
Whitley. (2020). Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD). National Association of School Psychologists (NASP). https://www.nasponline.org/professional-development/a-closer-look/self-regulated-strategy-development-(srsd)
Lee, A. (n.d.). 6 SRSD Writing Strategies. Www.understood.org. Retrieved July 6, 2022, from https://www.understood.org/en/articles/6-strategies-to-teach-kids-self-regulation-in-writing
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