CASL: What and Why   

The Center on Accelerating Student Learning (CASL) is designed to accelerate learning for students with disabilities or severe difficulties in reading, writing, or math in the early grades and thereby to provide a solid foundation for strong achievement in the intermediate grades and beyond. CASL is a five-year collaborative research effort supported by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). Participating institutions are the University of Maryland, Teachers College of Columbia University, and Vanderbilt University. In Tennessee, Doug Fuchs and Lynn Fuchs are developing peer-mediated learning and continuous progress-monitoring programs in reading and mathematics. In New York, Joanna Williams is developing methods to help students learn and apply problem-solving strategies for enhancing reading comprehension. In Maryland, Steve Graham and Karen Harris have developed strategy, self-regulation, and instructional techniques to enhance handwriting, spelling and composition development. During the 2000-2001 school year, Karen Harris, Steve Graham, Linda Mason, and their colleagues have worked with local schools, teachers, and students to develop and validate strategies for planning and writing both stories and opinion essays at the 2nd and 3rd grade levels. Our resulting lesson plans and support materials are being shared here on the MLRC web site. Why early intervention? Reading and writing failure begins in kindergarten and is difficult to remediate beyond the primary grades. When children fail at early reading and writing, they begin to dislike reading and writing, question their capabilities in these areas, and read and write less than their classmates. For children with disabilities in the primary grades, reading and writing failure is pervasive, with reading and writing difficulties affecting nearly all children who are identified as having a disability. All of this argues for intervening in the early grades--before children suffer loss of self-esteem, develop negative views about themselves as readers and writers, and begin a school career of sustained failure--or drop out of school. Unfortunately, most "state-of-the-art" early intervention programs are not successful for a large number of children with disabilities or severe difficulties. At least four reasons explain why established intervention programs do not work for many children with disabilities: 

1. Some validated practices are difficult to use in classrooms. This leads to inadequate
implementation of recommended practices. 

2. Most interventions lack the comprehensiveness needed to meet the multifaceted problems of students with disabilities who perform poorly in reading, writing, or math. Although an instructional program may address one difficulty a student experiences, it often fails to address other problems. 

3. Early reading, writing, and math instruction for students with disabilities focuses almost exclusively on basic skills. Insufficient attention is given to comprehension and knowledge application. 

4. Interventions have largely ignored the development of fluency (i.e., speed and ease of reading, writing, or doing math) and the need to plan instruction in ways that facilitate students' transfer of learning from a specific situation to other situations and their maintenance of skills over time. 

For students with disabilities, attention to fluency, transfer, and maintenance is essential. Thus, CASL investigators are working together to develop comprehensive approaches for providing children with disabilities and severe difficulties in the primary grades instruction that incorporates an explicit dual focus on basic and higher-order skills, that merges effective practices, and that promotes fluency, maintenance, and transfer of reading, writing, and mathematics skills. Our work in composition here at Maryland includes developing strategies children can use to plan, revise, and edit their written work, self-regulation procedures for managing these strategies and the writing process, and peer support of the writing process. 

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