The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between mixed eye-hand dominance and letter/word reversals in learning disabled and normal readers. Previous research had shown links between mixed dominance and reading disabilities, especially those disabilities related to visuo-spatial deficits. However, due to the different approaches to conceptualizing lateral preferences, the wide variety of methods used to assess laterality, and the heterogeneity of subjects exhibiting reading disabilities, many studies have been contradictory and inconclusive. This study was designed to: assess laterality on a continuum, investigate the specific area of mixed eye-hand dominance, and determine if there is a statistically significant relationship between the degree of mixed dominance and the specific reading problem of letter and word reversals.The research sample consisted of 53 learning disabled males and 44 males from regular education classrooms, randomly selected from a public school system in northern Indiana. Mixed eye-hand dominance was assessed by the General Laterality Factor and the Visual Activities Factor of the Lateral Preference Schedule. The degree of letter/word reversal difficulty was-determined by the Jordan Left-Right Reversal Test. Each subject was administered both instruments either individually or in small groups.The data was analyzed for statistical significance by computing Pearson product moment correlation coefficients. To compare the learning disabled readers and normal readers for significant differences in age and the degree of mixed eye-hand dominance, t tests were conducted. Two research questions were then addressed by examining the findings:Research Question #1: Is there a statistically significant relationship between mixed eye-hand dominance and letter/word reversal errors in learning disabled and normal readers? A statistically significant difference was found between the degree of mixed eye-hand dominance and reversal errors in the learning disabled group. No other statistically significant relationships were found.Research Question #2: Is there a greater degree of mixed eye-hand dominance in learning disabled students than in normal readers? There were no statistically significant differences between learning disabled and normal readers in the degree of mixed eye-hand dominance.It was concluded that there were no statistically significant relationships between mixed eye-hand dominance and reversal errors in normal readers or when groups of normal readers and learning disabled students were combined. There was, however, a statistically significant positive relationship between mixed dominance and reversal errors when learning disabled students were grouped separately. The greater the degree of mixed eye-hand dominance, the higher the reversal error score in learning disabled students.Attempts to develop more sensitive and reliable instruments to assess lateral preferences and specific reading problems were recommended. Additionally, studies investigating the relationship between lateral preferences and reading performance should continue. / Department of Educational Psychology

The purpose of this investigation was to determine effectiveness of teaching to the learning modality preference of poor readers classified as visual or auditory learners at the beginning of second grade.

Mothers of children with multiple disabilities have unique and important things to tell us about their children's schooling. In this work, the overarching question asks: How do the mothers of children with multiple disabilities narrate their experiences with their children's schooling, and what insights can their stories provide? Within a feminist framework that acknowledges participating mothers as “expert witnesses” (Traustadottir, 1991, p. 216) with important insights, this study employs a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to develop the themes that, taken together, can be said to describe these participants' experiences. Four mothers of children with multiple disabilities were interviewed in an open-ended qualitative manner, and their experiences are thematized in this thesis. It is my hope that the stories so generously offered by the participants, and the themes which arise from them, can play a part in guiding those involved in the education of students with multiple disabilities, in changing our practice and policies in order to truly include children with disabilities and their caregivers in our schools.

The Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities (ABLA) test, developed by Kerr, Meyerson, and Flora (1977) assesses the ease or difficulty with which individuals with developmental disabilities are able to learn a simple imitation and five two-choice discrimination tasks. During ABLA Level 2, referred to as a position discrimination task, the client is presented with a yellow can always on the left and a smaller red box always on the right. The client is required to place an irregularly shaped piece of foam into the container on the left (the yellow can) for a correct response. With this task a client can learn to make a correct response based on position, colour, shape, or size cues, or some combination of these. The current study evaluated the relative difficulty of ABLA Level 2 and two additional types of position discriminations. The first type of task was similar to ABLA Level 2, except that it used identical containers, and thus contained both relative and absolute position cues (the REAB task), but not shape, colour, or size cues. The second type of task was similar to ABLA Level 2; however, it incorporated identical containers that varied in their absolute positions, which required a relative position discrimination to arrive at the correct response (the RE task). In Experiment 1, I used an alternating-treatments design with replication within and across three participants who passed ABLA Level 2 but failed all higher levels, to examine how many trials were required to master tasks analogous to ABLA Level 2, versus REAB tasks, versus RE tasks. In Experiment 2, I used a within-subject design with replication across three participants to further clarify the relative difficulty of the three position discrimination tasks, and to determine whether correct container location (i.e. left versus right) can influence the difficulty of learning the tasks. The results demonstrated that there was no consistent difference in difficulty between the three types of tasks, and the difficulties experienced by P1 and P2 can be accounted for entirely by an interaction between the right-left location of the correct response and handedness.

A model of education known as the Expanded Core Curriculum (ECC) (Lohmeier 2005) proposes that, for blind students, the inability to learn visually severely curtails learning opportunities. A program of instruction must teach skills and knowledge traditionally learned by visual observation. The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between the ECC and social capital (Lareau and Weininger 2003) and to discover whether visually impaired individuals who have received an education based on the majority of the elements from the ECC demonstrate greater ability to acquire social capital than visually impaired individuals who have received a more traditional education based on the core curriculum. The data collected established the subjects’ level of social capital; the nature of their education (Core vs. ECC); the link if any between social capital and their educational experience; and the degree of social integration including upward career mobility. Findings included: • Those subjects who reported involvement in non-work related activities perceived a positive employment relationship, indicating high social capital. • Education based on the ECC was limited, as demonstrated by subjects’ limited career development. • Subjects made good use of tacit knowledge, even though the education received was not based on the ECC. • All subjects described their social relationships at work in functional rather than sociological terms. Subjects who described limited social activities with co-workers away from the workplace appeared to have limited social lives generally. The study’s conclusions are that formal instruction in soft skills and knowledge of the organization’s culture, as well as orientation to workplace culture, are critical to the development of a high-quality employment relationship. Initiatives to compensate for the inability of visually impaired persons to acquire this information coincidentally would help others who experience challenges in their efforts to acquire social capital

In my thesis I engage selected texts of Jacques Derrida, David Wills, and Jean-Luc Nancy in order to draw on specific motifs that are relevant for a thinking of sight and blindness. The motifs on which I elaborate are immediacy, prosthesis, and extension respectively. In consecutive chapters, based on close readings of these selected texts and the development of these motifs in them, my study elaborates on the relevance of the work of these three thinkers for a thinking of sight and blindness that does not conform to the hierarchical dualisms of Western metaphysics. Following this, I engage three texts by selected theorists from the large and growing field of disability studies—Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Lennard Davis, David T. Mitchell, and Susan L. Snyder—in order to make the case that disability studies has not yet challenged its own metaphysical assumptions.

Work may be a potential source of physical activity for adults with ID, and therefore may be beneficial to their health. Using a cross-sectional descriptive research design this study examined the contribution of work to the overall physical activity levels of adults with intellectual disabilities. GT3X Actigraph accelerometers were used to measure the physical activity intensity levels of six employed adults with intellectual disabilities over eight consecutive days. Intensity levels were categorized into sedentary, light, or moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA). The overall physical activity levels were determined to establish whether participants met the Canadian physical activity guidelines for adults. In addition physical activity levels during work were compared to physical activity during non-work. Five out of the six participants met the Canadian physical activity guidelines of 150 minutes of MVPA per week. There were no significant differences between the amount of sedentary, light or MVPA during participant’s work and non-work. There were, however, medium and large effect sizes for physical activity levels during work versus non-work, showing that work had a substantial impact on physical activity behaviours. / Graduate / 0566

Self-concept, or feelings about oneself, encompasses various areas including social and academic domains and has been suggested to be a predictor and mediator of other outcomes (Bryne, 1996). In this study, the relationships between achievement, intelligence scores, and self-concept in children with mild intellectual disabilities were examined. Self-concept and WISC verbal intelligence scores evidenced significant relationships. Additionally, relationships were demonstrated between gains in achievement and higher ratings of self-concept. These results suggest that relationships exist between intelligence, achievement, and self-concept in elementary school children with MID. Specifically, a positive relationship was demonstrated between achievement gains and self-concept. Associations between intelligence and self-concept also were demonstrated, where higher intelligence scores were related to both lower nonacademic self-concept and higher cognitive self-concept.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the experience of individuals who are aging with a lifelong and/or early-onset physical impairment. Method: A qualitative methodology was utilized consisting of narrative inquiry informed by the Life Course Perspective. The life course perspective is a dynamic approach that encompasses multiple theories including sociology, human development, and aging, highlighting how social, historical, and cultural contexts shape people’s lives. Narratives are storied ways of knowing and communicating that people use to organize events in their lives and make sense out of their experiences. Nine community-dwelling individuals (3 men; 6 women), aged 26-70, with mild to severe Cerebral Palsy were recruited using a combination of purposive and snowball sampling. Multiple (3-4), in-depth interviews were completed with each participant in order to co-construct their life stories. The data analysis was iterative. NVIVO 8 was used to organize the data, supporting a systematic caparison of emerging themes and categories, as well as the central plot that weaves the participants’ experiences together. Findings: “Defying the Odds” emerged as the central narrative that weaved together their experience of growing up and growing older. Their narrative is depicted through the trajectory of the disordered body that manifests itself in peaks and valleys. Their narrative is also weaved together by three central threads: Achieving a Sense of Belonging, Overcoming being Seen but not Heard, and Striving for Self-Reliance. “Normalization” emerged as a key recurring theme in the participants’ life stories. The focus of rehabilitation on "normalizing" movement, particularly walking, during childhood can lead to social psychological challenges as well as problems later in the life course as people encounter increasing fatigue and decreasing functional abilities but no longer have access to rehabilitation services. Implications: Theoretically, the disordered body needs to be reconceptualized in ways that are more positive. Conceptualizing a theory on aging with disability needs to be pursued. Clinically, we need to work towards developing a continuum of care across the life course with a focus on long-term maintenance and prevention of secondary health problems.

When we develop accounts of the good life we inevitably need to work with simplified images of human beings so as to limit the ideas our account must grapple with. Yet, in the process of this simplification we often exclude certain types of agents from having moral status because our image of humanity does not take their key features into account. The problems created by this type of simplification are very apparent when we consider how virtue ethics deals with the lives of people with Intellectual Disabilities. Since virtue ethics focuses on reason it very quickly excludes people with limited intellectual functioning from being moral agents who have access to the happy life. In this thesis I explore this problem of exclusion further and present a revised set of virtues based on the Capabilities Approach by Martha Nussbaum. By developing this new focus for virtue ethics I create a virtue-based approach to the good life that is not only more inclusive of agents with limited intellectual functioning but also represents a richer path to the good life for all agents.