A Way to Help Students Before They Fail (1/2)

Now, we continue our series on learning disabilities. We look this week at a process used to identify problems and help children avoid failure in school. This process is called response to intervention, or R.T.I. Lynn Fuchs is a special education professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. She studies R.T.I. and says more and more schools in the United States are using it.

Learning disabilities are neurological disorders that affect different skills. Federal law requires public schools to help disabled students through special education services and individualized programs.

The first step is finding which children need help. Professor Fuchs explains that the traditional way is to test students who are failing. But research shows that failure can lead to depression, and that can make improvement in school very difficult.

So some schools are using response to intervention as a way to identify problems much earlier. The growing interest also results from concerns that some children placed in special education programs do not truly have a learning disability. They may just need extra help with skills like reading or math.

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现在，我们继续我们的学习障碍系列。本周我们来谈谈一个用于鉴别（学习障碍）问题和帮助儿童避免在学校中失败的方法。这个方法叫做反映-干预法（R.T.I.）。田纳西州，纳什维尔范得比特大学的Lynn Fuchs是一位特殊教育学教授。她研究R.T.I.，并表示越来越多的美国学校在使用它。

学习障碍是影响不同技能的神经紊乱。联邦法律要求公立学校通过特殊教育服务和个体化方案帮助有障碍的学生。

第一步是找出哪些儿童需要帮助。Fuchs教授解释说，传统的方法是对（在学校中）失败的学生进行测试。但是研究表明，这一失败会导致抑郁，并使学生在校很难作出改善。

所以一些学校用反映-干预法作为更早鉴别（学习障碍）问题的方法。一些接受特殊教育项目的孩子并不是真有学习障碍，这也越来越引起人们的关注。他们可能仅是在如阅读和数学技能方面，需要额外的帮助。

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