Rethinking Service Delivery for Students With Significant Learning Problems

Despite recent advances in the development of instructional interventions, many students with significant learning problems do not benefit from them. This includes 25% to 50% of students with learning disabilities (LD). In this article, we identify five limitations of current instructional programs that may help to explain students’ inadequate responsiveness. The first of these is that the instructional programs often fail to address the difficulty students experience when transitioning from the primary grades to the intermediate grades. Second, many of the programs lack sufficient comprehensiveness in the strategies or the skills they address. Third, they typically do not teach for transfer. Fourth, they do not adequately address the linguistic and cognitive limitations of many struggling students. Fifth, they do not make use of implementation features that can optimize the intensity of instruction. We describe these limitations and explain how researchers might modify their instructional programs to make them more effective for children with severe learning problems.