What Is Special About Special Education for Students with Learning Disabilities?

How is special education for students with learning disabilities “special”? One way to approach this question is to review the intervention and descriptive studies of instruction and services for students with learning disabilities (LD) and report the ways in which special education provides a differentiated and appropriate education for students. At least with respect to the education that students with LD receive within general education, existing reviews reveal that undifferentiated instruction not specifically designed to meet the instructional needs of the student with LD prevails (see for review, Baker & Zigmond, 1995; McIntosh, Vaughn, Schumm, Haager, & Lee, 1993; Zigmond et al., 1995). Thus, there is a gap between what we know about effective instruction and the extent to which these practices are carried over into instructional settings. However, we were concerned that focusing on this would ignore aspects of special education that are associated with improved outcomes for students with LD. In this article, we describe what was perceived in the notso-distant past as necessary special instruction for students with LD and the relatively recent view linking progress monitoring and instructional outcomes as markers for progress with students with LD. In order to address the question of what is special about special education for students with LD, we first briefly review the literature about how special education was initially conceptualized for these students and how effective instructional models for those students have shifted from using underlying process approaches to emphasizing instructional effectiveness based on students’ learning in core academic areas. We then describe a three-tiered model for providing special education to students with LD. What Is Special About Special Education for Students with Learning Disabilities?