This research examines the applied learning environment and special-education classrooms. Awareness of how organizations and instructors have responded to the mandates of IDEA and ADA and in particular of full-inclusion responses to the educational needs of exceptional students may foster optimal strategic implementation and use of resources in the learning environment and point in the direction of effective classroom management and student development. The research reviews recent literature on the subject, and discusses implications of existing research with a view toward forecasting possible lines of experimental and practitioner development.
The big picture of special education literature is that it resists easy classification. In popular imagination, of course, special education tends to refer to the needs of disabled rather than gifted students. But an element that all special-needs or exceptional students share is some unique factor that intrinsically sets them apart from the mainstream student population. The literature of special education addresses a variety of aspects, in the context of mandates to both fully include and accommodate special-needs students, can be organized around several broad areas
Articles that report the results of empirical tests of specific strategies and techniques may lend scientific weight to theories of learning and instructional practice. Morse and Schuster (2000) evaluate the effectiveness of a way of training mildly mentally disabled elementary-school students to shop for groceries. The controlling theory of the evaluation is that the curriculum requires functional and long-term relevance for independent-living skills. The method used in the experiment was to shape instructional materials and guidance around needs identified in a literature review on the same subject. The study sought to determine whether a combination of storyboarded classroom simulations and "in vivo" or community-based in...