Youth and Parent Participation in Transition Planning in the U.S.A.: Findings from the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2012 (NLTS 2012)

The purpose of this study was to use data from the United States' National Longitudinal Transition Study 2012 (NLTS 2012) to present descriptive information on youth and parent participation and youth's role in required Individualized Education Program (IEP)/transition planning meetings by disability category and age groupings (14-22 year olds, 14-15 year olds, and 16-22 year olds). The study found that youth and parent attendance in IEP/transition planning meetings was high across disability categories, but the extent to which youth and parents met with teachers to discuss transition goals was much lower. Data from NLTS 2012 and a previous U.S. study, the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2 (NLTS2), were compared for youth's participation with school staff in discussing transition goals. A significant decline in participation was found over the past decade. Logistic regression analyses illustrated differences in youth and parent participation and youth's role by disability category.

Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Disability Categories

This chapter is a collection of case studies, discussion questions, and enrichment activities addressing each of the 13 disabilities covered under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), in addition to the disability categories of dyslexia and developmental delay. These case studies, questions, and enrichment activities address services that occur in a wide variety of public school settings. The purpose of this chapter is to serve as a supplemental text to courses in special education, psychology, counseling, nursing, and social work. Currently, there are scarce supplemental application resources available to instructors who are conducting teacher preparation courses and other disability-related courses.

Challenges and Victories of Virtual Environments With Students With Disabilities

The COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 altered the educational environment for everyone. Moving from an in-person environment to a virtual one can be highly problematic for individuals (specifically, students with disabilities) whose teachers most often use direct instruction strategies that require face-to-face interaction. This chapter will help the reader understand the variations of the characteristics of the different disability categories served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This chapter will provide the readers with instructional strategies that effectively mitigate difficulties with instruction in a virtual environment. Additionally, this chapter will examine the challenges observed in students with disabilities that make accessing the virtual educational setting problematic. These areas include race, culture, disability, and low socioeconomic factors. Finally, this chapter will provide the reader with tips from teachers and students as they have struggled to navigate this new educational environment.

A Systematic Review of Meta-Analyses in Special Education: Exploring the Evidence Base for High-Leverage Practices

It is crucial that special education teachers are equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. Despite federal legislation and efforts of the field to identify and disseminate evidence-based practices for students with disabilities, it is uncertain whether all special education teachers provide instruction based on the best available research. To better prepare special education teachers, McLeskey et al. proposed 22 high-leverage practices (HLPs). We conducted this systematic review of meta-analyses to provide an initial investigation of the experimental evidence reporting on the effectiveness of the HLPs for students with, or at risk for, a disability. Results indicated the largest amount of evidence from meta-analyses related to intensive instruction, explicit instruction, and social skills, with few meta-analyses reporting on collaboration and assessment. The results highlighted disproportional evidence according to disability categories. Implications for future research, practice, and teacher education are discussed.

Special Education and Gender in the United States

Historically, Western hegemonic order has been established through cultivating and legitimating social categories of difference. Schools, among other institutions, reinforce difference through marking ability, race, and gender to signify which bodies are productive, deficient, or dangerous and therefore in need of control. This process of differentiation and control is evident in the social, political, and education contexts of disabled youth whose race, gender, and sexuality are read, controlled, and resisted through policy and pedagogy. Through the processes of hypervisiblity, pathologization, and underserving of Black girls in schools, and especially within special education, this animates the nexus of gender, race, and disability. Parallels are drawn to paradigms of the female body and femininity, where difference is constructed as inferior to the normative male body. Similarly, special education policy, practice, and literature conceptualize disability as subtractive difference, wherein what is considered a “deficit” relies on a subtractive interpretation of a normative body or a normative way of being. In this regard, disability, gender—and, crucially, race—are often thought of as a negative departure from a normalized embodiment. In special education, such normalized, essentialist approaches to gender, race, and disability contribute to the disproportionate overidentification of some social identities and the underidentification of others, most often along raced and gendered lines. Importantly, disabling processes are institutionalized in education through the mechanism of special education, which not only serves as an instructional and academic response to a student’s disability but also acts as an institutional process that determines a student as disabled. The determination of a student having a disability is mediated through law, policy, and interpersonal interaction between school professionals and parents and caregivers. Disproportionate identification has been the focus of research, and studies show that overidentification occurs most often in disability categories that are considered “subjective”: for instance, specific learning disabilities and emotional disturbances. Such identification has an impact on students’ learning; opportunities to interact with their peers in general education settings; access to high quality, challenging curriculum; and opportunities to engage critical thinking in educational activities that go beyond direct instruction. Disabling processes in schools related to the intersection of disability, gender, and race, in particular, are mediated by the local, cultural interactions of school personnel and are evident in the ways in which Black girls, in particular, are disabled in school.

Arab Prophylactic Measures to Protect Individuals with Disabilities from the Spread of COVID-19

This descriptive research is aimed to assess the prophylactic measures used to deal with individuals with disabilities (IDs) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Arab countries. The United Nations Economic and Social Commission report for Western Asia (ESCWA, 2020) has been reviewed. The report included prophylactic measures employed to protect IDs during the COVID-19 pandemic in 15 Arab countries. The methodology of the research included using an analysis method to identify the nature and viability of the prophylactic measures used in Arab countries during the pandemic. The result showed that 65% of the prophylactic measures were governmental, and 35% were non-governmental. 55% of these measures dealt with all disability categories, 30% with hearing impairment, 10.83% with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and 4.17% with visual impairment. Saudi Arabia and Jordan were the two Arab countries that provided the most prophylactic measures to IDs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Living with singleness: needs and concerns of never-married women over 35

Background Cultural and religious norms and expectations may influence the needs and behavior of single women. This is particularly true in those countries where religion and cultural expectations are salient in everyday life. In this context, the present study investigated the needs and concerns of Iranian never-married women aged 35 and older. Methods This qualitative study involved a conventional content analysis. Interviews were done with 23 never-married women aged 36–64 years in Iran. Results A total of 773 codes, 22 subcategories, 8 categories, and 3 themes were extracted from the interviews. The 3 themes were: (1) mental-spiritual lack; categories were lack of emotional support, uncertain future, mental rumination, and sexual worries; (2) reform of culture and society; categories were an adverse effect of culture and being overlooked in society; (3) loneliness arising from disability; categories were aging and loneliness and sickness and loneliness. Conclusions The results of the analysis indicate that the needs and concerns of never-married women over the age of 35 years in Iran remain unmet. This suggests that policymakers and health planners should take into consideration the growing number of never-married women as a societal reality deserving of attention.

Estimated connectivity networks outperform observed connectivity networks when classifying people with multiple sclerosis into disability groups

Background: Multiple Sclerosis (MS), a neurodegenerative and neuroinflammatory disease, causing lesions that disrupt the brain's anatomical and physiological connectivity networks, resulting in cognitive, visual and/or motor disabilities. Advanced imaging techniques like diffusion and functional MRI allow measurement of the brain's structural connectivity (SC) and functional connectivity (FC) networks, and can enable a better understanding of how their disruptions cause disability in people with MS (pwMS). However, advanced MRI techniques are used mainly for research purposes as they are expensive, time-consuming, and require high-level expertise to acquire and process. As an alternative, the Network Modification (NeMo) Tool can be used to estimate SC and FC using lesion masks derived from pwMS and a reference set of controls' connectivity networks. Objective: Here, we test the hypothesis that estimated SC and FC (eSC and eFC)from the NeMo Tool, based only on an individual's lesion masks, can be used to classify pwMS into disability categories just as well as SC and FC extracted from advanced MRI directly in pwMS. We also aim to find the connections most important for differentiating between no disability vs evidence of disability groups. Materials and Methods: One hundred pwMS (age:45.51 ± 1.4 years, 66% female, disease duration: 12.97 ± 8.07 years) were included in this study. Expanded DisabilityStatus Scale (EDSS) was used to assess disability, 67 pwMS had no disability (EDSS<2). Observed SC and FC were extracted from diffusion and functional MRI directly in pwMS, respectively. The NeMo Tool was used to estimate the remaining structural connectome (eSC), by removing streamlines in a reference set of tractograms that intersected the lesion mask. The NeMo Tool's eSC was used then as input to a deep neural network to estimate the corresponding FC (eFC). Logistic regression with ridge regularization was used to classify pwMS into disability categories (no disability vs evidence of disability), based on demographics/clinical information (sex, age, race, disease duration, clinical phenotype, and spinal lesion burden) and either pairwise entries or regional summaries from one of the following matrices: SC, FC, eSC, and eFC. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) was used to assess the classification performance. Both univariate statistics and parameter coefficients from the classification models were used to identify features important to differentiating between the groups. Results: The regional eSC and eFC models outperformed their observed FC andSC counterparts (p-value<0.05), while the pairwise eSC and SC performed similarly (p=0.10). Regional eSC and eFC models had higher AUC (0.66-0.68) than the pair-wise models (0.60-0.65), with regional eFC having highest classification accuracy across all models. Ridge regression coefficients for the regional eFC and regional observed FC models were significantly correlated (Pearson's r= 0.52, p-value<10e-7). Decreased estimated SC node strength in default mode and ventral attention networks and increased eFC node strength in visual networks were associated with evidence of disability. Discussion: Here, for the first time, we use clinically-acquired lesion masks to estimate both structural and functional connectomes in patient populations to better understand brain lesion-dysfunction mapping in pwMS. Models based on the NeMo Tool's estimates of SC and FC better classified pwMS by disability level than SC and FC observed directly in the individual using advanced MRI. This work provides a viable alternative to performing high-cost, advanced MRI in patient populations, bringing the connectome one step closer to the clinic.

Adolescent Disability, Post-16 Destinations, and Early Socioeconomic Attainment: Initial Evidence from Next Steps

Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in the prevalence of adolescent disability. However, research on the life-course transitions and trajectories of disabled adolescents remains sparse. This working paper addresses the lack of longitudinal evidence surrounding school-to-work transitions of disabled young people in England. We analyse longitudinal data from Next Steps in order to provide a descriptive analysis of post- 16 transitions and early socioeconomic attainment of disabled young people in England. Our analysis moves beyond existing studies by examining the whole range of post-16 destinations, and by exploring variation between different disability categories wherever possible. We also examine whether disability differentials in post-16 destinations and economic activity in early adulthood vary by social class, ethnicity, and gender, highlighting opportunities for intersectional analyses. Overall, our results show substantial disability differentials in post-16 destinations. We find that disabled young people are less likely to stay in post-16 education and more likely to experience unemployment compared to non- disabled peers. Results reveal inequalities in the type of post-16 education young people follow too, with disabled cohort members more likely to be in general Further Education colleges and less likely to attend school sixth forms and sixth form colleges, as well as university, compared to students with no long-standing limiting conditions and/or learning difficulties. We find pronounced disability gaps in young people’s main activity at age 25, documenting variations by other social divisions. We also outline avenues for future research on adolescent disability and social inequality.

Living with singleness: needs and concerns of never-married women over 35

Background: Cultural and religious norms and expectations may influence the needs and behavior of single women. This is particularly true in those countries where religion and cultural expectations are salient in everyday life. In this context, the present study investigated the needs and concerns of Iranian never-married women aged 35 and older.Methods: This qualitative study involved a conventional content analysis. Interviews were done with 23 never-married women aged 36-64 years in Iran.Results: A total of 773 codes, 22 subcategories, 8 categories, and 3 themes were extracted from the interviews. The 3 themes were: 1. mental-spiritual lack; categories were lack of emotional support, uncertain future, mental rumination, and sexual worries; 2. reform of culture and society; categories were adverse effect of culture and being overlooked in society; 3. loneliness arising from disability; categories were aging and loneliness and sickness and loneliness.Conclusions: The results of the analysis indicate that the needs and concerns of never-married women over the age of 35 years in Iran remain unmet. This suggests that policymakers and health planner should take into consideration the growing number of never-married women as a societal reality deserving of attention.