Many parents fear the concept of mainstreaming, that their children will be dumped into classes in an indiscriminant manner. In fact care is taken that the student is placed in a regular classroom with the support needed to perform adequately. Mainstreaming includes the concept that the student will benefit from regular placement. Concern regarding the disruption of the classroom, by the disabled student is legitimate. Children with extreme disability or disruptiveness are not frequently mainstreamed (McNamara & McNamara, 1995). Most students with learning disabilities are placed in regular classroom settings with special education services in a resource room during the school day; this is different from placement in a special education self-contained classroom. Resource room instruction provides the student with ways and means to succeed in the regular classroom, thus allowing for normalization (McNamara & McNamara, 1995). Flipsen, P. (1995). Speaker-listener familiarity: parents as judges of delayed speech intelligibility. Journal of Communication Disorders, 28(1), 3-19. Research shows that parent's concerns or appraisals of their children's development represent meaningful indicators of true developmental and behavioral status (70 to 80 percent), however, only about half of these children actually have developmental problems. Concerns regarding self-help, gross motor skills, and social skills are not shown to be associated with true problems. Concerns regarding speech-language development or behavioral problems are highly associated with true speech-language or behavioral problems (Glascoe, 1994). Flipsen (1995) reports that mothers tend to be better than all other listeners (including fathers) at identifying words being spoken by speech-delayed children with normal hearing; Thus the overall superior performance of mothers was supported. However, different studies challenge this concept and argue that their findings indicate no differences |
