STUDENTS WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES

Intellectual disability

  • significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning, existing concurrently with deficits in adaptive behavior and manifested during the developmental period, that adversely affects a child’s educational performance. (IDEA)

    • Subaverage general intellectual functioning is defined as a score on a standardized intelligence test below 68

AAIDD- American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Intellectual disability

  • is a disability characterized by significant limitations in intellectual functioning and adaptive behavior as expressed in conceptual, social, and practical skills. This disability originates during the developmental period, defined operationally as before the individual attains age 22 (AAIDD)

    • Adaptive behaviors

      • are “learned behaviors that reflect an individual’s social and practical competence to meet the demands of everyday living”

      • a collection of conceptual, social, and practical skills.

        • Conceptual skills include memory, language, reading, writing, math reasoning, acquisition of practical knowledge, problem solving, and judgment in novel situations.

        • Social skills include empathy, interpersonal communication skills, friendship abilities, social judgment, and awareness of others’ thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

        • Practical skills involve learning and self-management across life settings, including personal care, job responsibilities, money management, recreation, self-management of behavior, and school and work task orientation.

HISTORY OF INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES

1951: People with intellectual disabilities were often institutionalised, segregated from society, and even sterilised.

  • ARC - led the human rights movement to deinstitutionalize people with intellectual disabilities and advocated for "normalisation" or providing a life for people with disabilities in community settings.

1975: The Education for All Handicapped Children Act 94-142 was passed, which required all public schools to provide equal access to an education for all students with disabilities.

2010: Rosa's Law replaced "mental retardation" with "intellectual disabilities" in the Rehabilitation Act, the Higher Education Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the IDEA.

Prevalence and Causes of Intellectual Disabilities

Among students receiving special education services, 6% percent are identified as having an intellectual disability.

Genetic Causes

  • The two most common genetic causes of intellectual disabilities are Down syndrome and fragile X syndrome.

  1. Down syndrome

    • occurs in approximately one in every 700 babies

    • TYPES:

      1. trisomy 21

        • most common type of Down syndrome, which accounts for approximately 95% of cases,

        • a person has an extra chromosome called chromosome 21

      2. Mosaicism

        • 2% of cases

        • is diagnosed when there is a mixture of two types of cells, some containing the usual 46 chromosomes and some containing an extra chromosome (i.e., chromosome 21).

      3. translocation

        • 3% of cases

        • diagnosed when an additional full or partial copy of chromosome 21 attaches to another chromosome,

  2. Fragile X syndrome

    • caused by the mutation of a single gene, fragile X messenger ribonucleoprotein 1 (FMR1)

    • genetically inherited.

IDENTIFYING STUDENTS WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES

Educators and clinicians may use:

1. Intelligence tests

• ex: Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children.

2. Adaptive behaviour skills assessments

  • ex: Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales,
    Supports Intensity Scale

  • Supports Intensity Scale - measure the support needs of students with intellectual disabilities across categories of adaptive behaviour.

3. Academic skills assessments

• ex: standardised and curriculum-based assessments and examples of students' coursework.

Needed support should be assessed using self-reports from the students and their parents or guardians.

Direct observation of a student's behaviour may also help determine their level of functioning compared with that of their peers and in different environments.

Person-centred planning (PCP) has become an important process enabling the person with a disability, and people significant to them, to be fully involved in developing plans for the future