Academic Articles Summary

Learning Disabilities and Friendship

As a student majoring in either learning disabilities or cognitive impairments in relation to elementary education, I felt that researching the effect friendship has on those with learning disabilities would be helpful. Friendships in elementary school may have an effect on our ability to create friendships throughout our adult lives.We learn the basic social skills in elementary school and then expand on them in our later years. There are many articles that describe the friendships created and social development with people that have learning disabilities.

The first article that caught my attention, Best Friendships of Students With or Without Learning Disabilities Across Late Elementary School, by David Estell, Martin Jones, Ruth Pearl, and Richard van Acker,  focused on the social interactions between children with learning disabilities and their peers within grades four through six in schools in the Midwest. The study conducted focused on the number of friends each student made, the ability to maintain that friendship over a period of time, and the proportion of friends that had disabilities as well, to the friends that didn't have disabilities. In the research conducted, data was collected from a number of students two months into each semester from their third grade classes to their sixth grade classes. Each time data was collected the students had the opportunity to make a list of their best friends from a list of students in their classroom. The study discovered that although children with learning disabilities identified around the same number of friends as children without learning disabilities, the friend nominations were not reciprocated. As a conclusion to the study, the results showed that students with learning disabilities were as likely to have at least one best friend ans students that did not have learning disabilities. Also, students with learning disabilities were just as capable as students without learning disabilities to maintain their friendships over a period of time. I find these results surprising because I have always been lead to believe that people with learning disabilities would have a harder time making friends. Previous studies have shown that people with learning disabilities are more succeptable to social isolation.. In this study the friends that students with learning disabilities made, however, were mostly students that also had learning disabilities. In order for students with learning disabilities to gain better social acceptance they may need a support system.
The second article, Filling the Emotional Gap at Transition: Young People with Learning Difficulties and Friendship, by Val Williams and Pauline Heslop, aimed at understanding the emotional needs of people with learning disabilities and how to help them become stronger socially. The study involved interviewing different groups of people and asking them what kinds of support systems they had to help them transition through life. Many of the people that participated in the study found support in the community. The focus of this article is preparing people with learning disabilities for real life outside of the support within schools. I feel that this is relevant to look at because teachers should play a role in how prepared students with learning disabilities are for social situations in the real world. What students learn in the elementary level will play a key role in how prepared they are to handle situations on their own. If they learn how to create friendships among their peers, they will be much better off when entering the real world and college.
Teachers need to be aware of their influence on the social acceptance of students with learning disabilities. I found the article "Collaboration to Promote Social Competence for Students with Mild Disabilities in the General Classroom: A Structure for Providing Social Support, by Hedda Meadan and Lisa Monda-Amaya, to be an insightful look at how teachers can influence the lives of students with learning disabilities. The articles states that general education teachers and special education teachers need to work together to create a consistant environment that will allow each student to learn and have chances to expand their social skills. The study has a system that is called the positive behavior support (PBS) that is used in classrooms. The first plan of action is to create an environment that is socailly accpetable to learning disabled students. This step involves creating rules in the classroom, raising awareness to different disabilities, and creating opportunities for the learning disabled students to interact and work with others. The second step is to teach a particular curriculum that may promote social competence. This may involve childrens books that relate to how to deal with emotions, character education, and teachings how to resolve conflicts. The third step includes promoting confidence and teachingself-management strategies. These three steps are the main guidelines that should be used in a classroom to make sure that learning disabled students have the same oportunities to expand socially as students without these disabilities.This article relates to the others in the sense that it focuses on allowing learning disabled students to create friendships and learn the social skills necessary to make it in real life.