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The Individuals with Disabilities Improvement Act (IDEA) was reauthorized by Congress in 2004 (IDEA, 2004). The new legislation permits educational practitioners to identify students suspected of having a learning disability by continuing to use the ability-achievement discrepancy model or by the analysis of the child's response to prescriptive intervention delivered through a systematic multi-tiered instructional intervention approach which has become to be known as Response to Intervention (RtI). However, the change in the federal legislation does not provide specific guidelines for the planning and implementation of intervention services. The examination of the effectiveness of instructional intervention programs, the reliability of the ability-achievement discrepancy model to identify a child of having a suspected learning disability, and an introduction to the concept of Response to Intervention (RtI) is included in this work. The purpose of the present work is the development of a RtI Innovation Configuration Map that may be utilized as a guide for the planning, development, and implementation of a school-based RtI program that is also useful to assess the operationalization of a school-based RtI program in use. The procedures followed for the development of the RtI Innovation Configuration Map included the selection of a national review panel of educational practitioners from across the country to confirm the essential components and action steps to be considered when planning for the implementation of a RtI program. A RtI Innovation Configuration Map Team was selected from a school in Virginia that had successfully opertionalized a RtI program as a result of the schools participation in the Virginia Department of Education's RtI Initiative. The RtI Map Team developed a RtI Innovation Configuration Map that included varying levels of implementation of the essential components and action steps that were identified by the national review panel. To assess the utility of the RtI Innovation Configuration Map to illustrate the varying levels of implementation of a school-based RtI program, individuals from four schools taking part in the Virginia Department of Education's RtI initiative were randomly selected and interviewed regarding the RtI program being implemented in their school. Based on those interviews and other evidence obtained at the four schools, the utility of the RtI Innovation Configuration Map was revised. ; Ed. D.

In 1996, Congress passed sweeping reforms aimed at overhauling the welfare system. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act ("PRWORA") included a new definition of childhood disability that, it is estimated, excluded 100,000 children from SSI benefits. This Note explains the changes implemented within the childhood disability system and explains the reasoning behind those changes. It then argues that the regulations promulgated in response to PRWORA exclude truly disabled children from receiving disability benefits. These regulations violate the Social Security Act, are inconsistent with the stated policies of the Social Security Administration and draw arbitrary distinctions, violating the legislative intent of the Social Security Act.

Introduction - Recent attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, is perhaps one the worst act of terrorism committed involving children and adolescent. There have been numerous acts of school shootings reported from Western and American schools but these have generally been acts of individuals [1]. Although this trauma is unique in many aspects, the region in which this school is located has borne the brunt of trauma and terror suffering for almost three decades now. Many school buildings have been destroyed in the region. A complex interplay of social, political and religious values, and witnessing violence as an everyday phenomenon already had an impact on the mental health of the population in general, and women and children in particular [2-4]. The mental health professionals are faced with a number of challenges in these situations. One major challenge is how we provide the evidence based treatments for such psychological trauma as well as prevent the long term consequences in children who are in the crucial stages of their emotional and cognitive development. These challenges are not easy to face especially when we consider lack of mental health services for children in places like Peshawar. The Mental Health Services for adults are already overstretched in providing the care for severe mental disorders. In this article we will provide the outline of an evidence based response in these situations.

Evaluation of a group parenting programme in the Northern Territory of Australia showed significant differences in benefits for Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal boys and girls. The analysis considers whether boys and girls from different cultural backgrounds present with different problems; whether parental expectations for boys and girls differ and whether the intervention activates different responses in different settings. Conclusions suggest that there is a need to closely examine the 'cultural logic' of interventions, the appropriateness of their assumptions about child development and hypothesised mechanisms of change in different settings.

This research investigated the role of 12 personal characteristics as they predisposed 33 first-line supervisors to change their interactions with employees in accordance with a behavioral modeling training program. Questionnaires were administered to groups of trained and control supervisors both before and after a 10-week training period. These instruments measured perceptions of behavioral change as well as a variety of personal characteristics including self-actualization, regard for others and the self, role clarity, role ambiguity, role conflict, stress, control, competence, education level, job tenure, and company tenure. Eight of these twelve characteristics proved significantly predictive of change for trained supervisors while none were predictive for control supervisors. The pattern of predictive characteristics indicated that feelings of well-being may be more conducive to acceptance of organizational training programs than feelings of need. The results are discussed insofar as they shed light on the behavior change hypotheses of social learning theory.

During adolescence, young people are traversing exciting and also challenging stages in their development. Mindfulness, if taught in a developmentally appropriate way, has the potential to be an asset in adolescents' lives. Developmentally appropriate approaches of mindfulness intervention during adolescence need to consider adolescents' social contexts (for example, school setting, peer group, family), their cognitive and emotional stages in development, and age‐specific strength and vulnerabilities. This chapter puts mindfulness education into a developmental perspective, and presents the Learning to BREATHE program as a school‐based universal intervention for adolescents. The authors describe developmental dimensions and themes of the program, and discuss common challenges of program implementation in schools. A case example of bringing the Learning to BREATHE program into the school context is provided.

This paper explores Greek-Cypriot parents' role in influencing developments regarding the education of disabled children in Cyprus. It mainly comments upon parents' conceptualisations of disabled children's rights which guided their responses to educational, social and political issues related to disability. The historical and interpretative nature of this paper is achieved by building arguments through interpreting qualitative data covering the period 1970-2007. Four periods associated with important developments were identified to facilitate understanding of parental involvement in politics: (i) early forms of parental mobilisation; (ii) parent groups acting as 'non-pressure' groups; (iii) parental power through networking; and (iv) resolving issues of identity and power between parent pressure groups. The paper ends with a critical discussion of parental involvement in education politics in relation to the nature of parent associations which constitute this evolving pressure group. ; peer-reviewed

Recent research has questioned the role of gender in language development and in special education outcomes, yet neither issue has been addressed in literature on students who are deaf or hard of hearing. To determine if language and placement outcomes differ by gender, the present study considered the behavior of children who attended a clinical program subscribing to an auditory-verbal philosophy. Parents of 28 boys and 42 girls with hearing losses evaluated their children using the Parent Rating Scale of the Letter International Performance Scale—Revised (Roid & Miller, 1997) and the Parental View of Therapy Scale (developed for the present study). Also, clinical file data were surveyed. The boys were found to be more likely than the girls to be rated by their parents as having basic features of temperament nonconducive to traditional clinical language intervention. The girls' language and placement outcomes surpassed the boys', although both groups' outcomes were positive. A possible limitation of the study was that the population was atypical of students with hearing losses in general.