Introduction
When teachers work with people who have special needs, they should adapt instructions and provide students with appropriate resources. The focus is usually on adjusting some information and offering certain content enhancements. The problem is in the fact that such enhancements should be of high quality to guarantee that students with disabilities have opportunities to work along with other students in a class. In his article, Sencibaugh (2005) pays much attention to analyzing different types of content enhancement strategies and devices. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the usefulness of content enhancement tools and methods and focus on the efficiency of one of the most popular instructional adaptations.
The usefulness of Content Enhancement Devices
It is important to note that content enhancement tools and strategies are extremely useful for people with special needs. The reason is that students with disabilities need to be provided with resources and instructions that differ from traditional ones to guarantee effective work with the material (Sencibaugh, 2005). When teachers do not try to adapt their instructions to diverse students, and when they do not refer to content enhancements, there are risks that students with disabilities cannot understand or remember the presented material.
On the contrary, when instructors prepare adapted resources, guides, and visual materials to offer them to students with disabilities, these young people learn information more effectively because it correlates with their skills and levels of understanding. According to Sencibaugh (2005), the differentiated instruction based on the use of content enhancement tools is important to ensure that students are involved in a learning process and that they can easily interact with a teacher. Thus, students with special needs require certain tools, instruments, and strategies that can help them identify the important information, work with different concepts, and complete various tasks. From this point, content enhancements can be discussed as useful to stimulate students’ learning in the classroom.
Peer-Medicated Strategy as the Most Useful Technique
In his paper, Sencibaugh (2005) lists several content enhancement techniques that can be viewed as rather useful to support the work of students with disabilities. These techniques and strategies include the use of organizers, visuals, mnemonic techniques, study guides, and peer-mediated strategies among others. In this context, the peer-mediated technique can be discussed as the most effective one because of its complex nature. Two types of this technique are known as class-wide peer tutoring and cooperative learning (Sencibaugh, 2005). When teachers choose peer tutoring, they can provide students with a range of additional resources and visuals as well as guarantee their communication with peers.
The peer-mediated strategy can be successfully applied to different classrooms to organize the work of diverse students and focus on scaffolding. If a class is large and there are many students with disabilities, it is important to apply class-wide peer tutoring. In this context, all students are divided into pairs, and individuals with special needs can cooperate with their peers to complete tasks, communicate, and receive the needed assistance. If there are only one or two students with disabilities in a class, it is reasonable to refer to cooperative learning. Thus, students are grouped to collaborate while completing certain assignments, and students with disabilities learn not only from additional guides or visuals but also from the experience and assistance of their peers. From this point, this strategy is most appropriate to contribute to students’ learning and socialization.
Conclusion
The use of content enhancement tools and devices is important in classes where there are students with disabilities. Still, various types of strategies and adaptations are oriented to achieving different goals. As a result, peer tutoring can be viewed as the most useful strategy in this context because of the possibility to combine all content enhancements while using this approach.
Reference
Sencibaugh, J. M. (2005). A synthesis of content enhancement strategies for teaching students with learning problems at the secondary level. Proceedings from the Council for Exceptional Children International Conference. Web.