<p> Research indicates the characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder include challenges with receptive and expressive language, which can negatively impact social-emotional development and physical regulation. The needs of children with autism are expected to greatly impact the current medical and educational resources, thus effective intervention for language development is considered crucial. A recently implemented intervention is music therapy. Effective intervention strategies for families and special education staff are constantly being sought after. This qualitative study sought to determine, (a) how does music therapy affect the receptive and expressive language skills in children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder aged 3&ndash;8 years? (b) what components of music therapy do parents and music therapists profess to make the most impact on language acquisition development in their child diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, aged 3&ndash;8? Participants included ten family units in southern California and six music therapists in the states of California, Oregon, Idaho and Washington. The participants were asked to provide information pertaining to the language ability of their child/client before and after participating in music therapy. Results showed an increase in word utterance, progress toward special education goals, emotional wellbeing, expressive communication in the home and community, and an increase in social skills. The language ability of the children before and after participating in music therapy sessions ranged from a nonverbal state to singing songs, from using gestures to speaking three to four word phrases, from using language without pragmatics to making friends, and from uttering one to two word phrases to regulating their emotions. </p><p>

<p> Teaching students with Intellectual Disability (ID) is a relatively new endeavor. Beginning in 2001 with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, the general education curriculum integrated algebra across the K-12 curriculum (Kendall, 2011; National Governors Association Center for Best Practices &amp; Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010), and expansion of the curriculum included five intertwined skills (productive disposition, procedural fluency, strategic competence, adaptive reasoning, and conceptual understanding) (Kilpatrick, Swafford, &amp; Findell, 2001). Researchers are just beginning to explore the potential of students with ID with algebra (Browder, Spooner, Ahlgrim-Delzell, Harris &amp; Wakeman, 2008; Creech-Galloway, Collins, Knight, &amp; Bausch, 2013; Courtade, Spooner, Browder, &amp; Jimenez, 2012; G&ouml;ransson, Hellblom-Thibblin, &amp; Axdorph, 2016). Most of the research examines the development of procedural fluency (G&ouml;ransson et al., 2016) and few researchers have explored high school level skills. </p><p> Using a single-case multiple-baseline across participants design, the study proposes to teach two algebra skills to six high school students with ID, creating an equation (<i>y</i> = <i>mx</i> + <i> b</i>) from a graph of a line and creating a graph from an equation. The six high school students with ID will be recruited from a school district in central Virginia. The intervention package modeled after Jimenez, Browder, and Courtade (2008), included modeling, templates, time delay prompting, and a task analysis. Results showed that all six individuals improved performance during intervention for the target skills over baseline; results also indicated that in three out of the six cases some generalization to the inverse skill occurred without supplemental intervention. The ability of individuals with ID to generalize the learning without intervention provides some evidence that individuals with ID are developing conceptual understanding while learning procedural fluency.</p><p>

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 allows schools to utilize response to intervention (RtI) as early intervention to prevent at-risk students from becoming labeled as learning disabled. Using action research methodology and school change theory, the purpose of this project study was to determine the RtI implementation needs of a rural elementary school (LE). The guiding research question was to identify the components of an RtI framework currently being utilized during the pre-referral process at LE. This study employed a qualitative method triangulation design to analyze data from key stakeholders including questionnaires; individual interviews from six reading teachers, one reading interventionist, and one special education teacher; and campus documents analysis. Analysis included data transformation of frequency statistics from surveys and coded data from open-ended questionnaire responses, individual interviews, and document analysis. These data were triangulated revealing the current level of practice in collaboration, data-based decision making, parent involvement, professional development, and implementation monitoring. Findings indicated utilization of several RtI components inconsistently across grade levels and subjects. As a result, an RtI action plan was developed including a description of RtI background, identification of current levels of practice, implementation steps including timetable, and an RtI glossary. This resource has the potential to aid other districts by providing an implementation plan that could be adapted to their campus needs. This study promotes positive social change by identifying an effective implementation process for a unified service delivery model at LE resulting in improving the education of all students.

<p> Mental health screeners need to demonstrate measurement equivalence across the populations of their intended use in order to improve the fairness in the identification of students in need of social, emotional, and behavioral supports. This study examined measurement invariance on three mental screeners across five racial and ethnic groups. The <i>Elementary Social Behavior Assessment</i> measures academic enablers associated with the latent construct of teachability (ESBA). The <i>Student Risk Screening Scale </i> assesses externalizing problems (SRSS) and the <i>Student Internalizing Behavior Screener</i> measures internalizing problems (SIBS). Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses tested for measurement invariance from the sample of African American (18%), Asian American/Pacific Islander (13%), Latino Hispanic (25%), European American (31%), and multiracial (11%) groups of students in elementary schools. Only the ESBA required respecification to establish an adequate baseline model. The ESBA, SRSS, and SIBS demonstrated metric invariance with ordinal ratings of <i>never, occasionally, sometimes</i>, and <i> frequently</i> in addition to scalar invariance with the thresholds between the ordinal ratings. Thus, the total scores from the ESBA, SRSS, and SIBS generalize across racial and ethnic groups and the student&rsquo;s race or ethnicity is less likely to mask their true level of need for social, emotional, and behavioral supports. The results indicate that the ESBA, SRSS, and SIBS may help teachers to identify racially and ethnically students who need intervention, to customize the interventions, and to evaluate students&rsquo; response to intervention. Schools using these mental health screeners may reduce disproportionality in discipline and special education.</p><p>