A Survey on Literacy Instruction for Students with Multiple Disabilities

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the Individuals with Disabilities Improvement Education Act of 2004 stress the importance of giving every child access to the general education curriculum. The Reading First program, under the No Child Left Behind Act, aimed to establish evidence-based literacy instruction for all students in kindergarten through the third grade (U.S. Department of Education, 2007). Despite this aim, data from the federal quota registration that are collected annually by the American Printing House for the Blind (APH) revealed that 36% of all school-aged students who are legally blind were categorized as nonreaders (APH, 2005). Nonreaders are defined as "students [who] show no reading potential; students who do not fall into any of the above categories [visual readers, braille readers, auditory readers, and prereaders]" (APH, 2007, Reading Media section). This definition starkly implies that nonreaders lack access to literacy instruction, especially considering that the prereader category is defined to include "students [who are] working on or toward a readiness level" (APH, 2007, Reading Media section). The quota-registration data do not clearly indicate bow many nonreaders have multiple disabilities; however, the literature in the field of visual impairment links the presence of additional disabilities to the illiteracy rates of students who are blind or have low vision (Mullen, 1990; Spungin, 1990; Wittenstein & Pardee, 1996). The lack of literacy instruction for students with visual impairments and additional disabilities may be the result of teachers not feeling adequately prepared to provide literacy instruction to this unique population of students (Agran, Alper, & Wehmeyer, 2002; Cook, 2001; Downing, 1996; Dunst et al., 2001; McLetchie & MacFarland, 1995) and the beliefs of some teachers that these students benefit more from a functional curriculum than from literacy instruction (Browder, Wakeman, Spooner, Ahlgrim-Delzell, & Algozzine, 2006; Kliewer, 1998). Although recent studies have demonstrated that children with severe and multiple disabilities can benefit from access to literacy instruction (Browder et al., 2006; Kliewer, 1998; Kliewer et al., 2004; Koppenhaver & Erickson, 2003), few studies have documented the academic priorities for students with visual impairments and multiple disabilities. This survey investigated the attitudes and instructional practices of teachers of students with visual impairments who provide services to students with multiple disabilities in a southeastern state. Specifically, it inquired about the factors that the teachers used to determine when to begin literacy instruction, the teachers' beliefs about reading instruction, and the areas that are targeted for instruction for students with multiple disabilities. The term literacy has a variety of meanings, depending on the context in which it is used. For the purpose of this article, literacy is defined as the ability to use words. This simple definition includes all the skills that lead to reading and writing, including using alternative and augmentative devices to communicate or following a daily schedule consisting of object symbols representing the day's activities. These skills may not begin by using text to represent words, but they still provide a mode for students to communicate both expressively and receptively. Eventually, they can enable students who are unable to speak or write conventionally to demonstrate their comprehension of text. Therefore, the survey included items regarding communication, reading, and writing skills. METHOD The procedures used in this study were approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Northern Colorado. The state Instructional Materials Center for Students Who Are Visually Impaired distributed the survey invitations to all teachers of students with visual impairments via electronic mail. …