In recent years, the concept of individualized instruction has gained increasing attention among special educators, researchers, and policy makers in China. At the same time, many are concerned that as a concept borrowed from Western countries, individualized instruction may not be successfully implemented in China’s social and cultural context. The literature, however, has revealed little empirical information about what Chinese teachers actually do and think about individualized instruction. This study therefore aimed to investigate Chinese special education teachers’ perceptions and practices related to individualizing or adapting instruction for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Specifically, the investigation focused on teachers who taught elementary Chinese language arts and math in public special education schools for students with IDD in Shanghai and were considered as effective teachers by school administrators. A generic qualitative research design was utilized. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a total of 31 teachers from six schools. Thematic analysis was employed to analyze the interview data.
Analysis revealed that the participants shared many similarities in their practices and perceptions. In general, they recognized the wide range of student differences existing in their classrooms and the necessity of adapting instruction to accommodate student differences. However, in reality, practices and beliefs associated with one-size-fits-all approaches of teaching were prevalent. Although all participants described making efforts to address individual differences, these efforts seemed to be inadequate, as indicated by significant limitations in both assessment and adaptation practices reported in the study. The participants perceived fully addressing the needs of individual students as difficult and described challenges in four areas.
The study revealed that teachers seemed to hold the conflicting perceptions that instruction should be adapted to accommodate individual needs and that the structure of standardized approaches of teaching should be maintained. In this context, a fenceng instruction method was used to address individual differences, which involved minor changes to traditional standardized approaches of teaching; instruction tailored to each individual’s need was not found.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/39322 |
| Date | 27 January 2020 |
| Creators | Huang, Shuoxi |
| Contributors | Lehr, Donna H. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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