Early intervention in the education of children with disabilities especially at the pre-school level is essential, because it will determine how well students will later be able to proceed with their studies. However, there are a number of challenges that make appropriate intervention at the pre-school level a great challenge. Some of the challenges may include the lack of sufficient information from solid research on children at this level in order to design a curriculum that would start off the children in the right direction. The lack of information from research may be attributed to other research related problems such as the selection of reliable measures that can be used to value the outcome (Stout & Coots, 2006).
Notably children with developmental disabilities also differ greatly in terms of their relative development and as such research cannot be uniformly tailored for all of them because they may be at differing developmental progress stages or experiencing different levels of disability influence on their learning abilities. Additionally, there are ethical concerns on research at this level especially, where intervention is withheld for control groups.Curriculum development is also a challenge because of the widespread variation in intervention programs and lack of supportive research information for curriculum development.
However, it is good to note that the curriculum development for children at this stage should adopt a more structured form rather than a developmental form of curriculum. This is mainly because children with disabilities at this level may be at different developmental stages even though they are of the same age in terms of years. The extent of disabilities also differs greatly and the kind of influence they have on both development and learning differ (Stout & Coots, 2006). Therefore, including aspects such as accounting for students’ at this level may not be appropriate as required by the developmental curriculum.
A structured approach is also favorable for such students and levels of education because it relies on cooperation and is more teacher-dominated rather than the developmental form which relies on the students’ initiative to a greater extent (Stout & Coots, 2006). A structured curriculum also requires a deliberate effort of integration in the field so that there can be structural adjustments. The adoption of a structured curriculum also requires extrinsic motivation which is actually the best for children with disabilities because they lack the intrinsic motivation that may be in “normal” children and found within a developmental mode of curriculum (Stout & Coots, 2006).
References
Stout, K. and Coots, J. J (2006),. Critical reflections about students with special needs: stories from the classroom, Pearson/Allyn and Bacon
