Mediated and collaborative learning for students with learning disabilities : "This is about life, it's the rules of life."

Many approaches have been developed to help students with learning disabilities become independent learners. One such program, developed by the National Institute for Learning Disabilities (NILD), is a one-on-one model of educational therapy that is designed to stimulate students' neurological weaknesses and improve deficits in perception and/or cognition. As an educational therapist, I am always looking for ways to enhance my ability to mediate my students' learning and to help them transfer what is learned in educational therapy to other settings. In my search I became acquainted with the Cognitive Enrichment Advantage (CEA) approach to learning. As an adaptation of Feuerstein's theory of mediated learning, the CEA approach gives students an explicit way to learn how to learn that I saw could be incorporated within the NILD Educational Therapy^™ Model. I chose a case study approach and used action research as a way to examine my 'new' practice systematically and carefully. The purpose of this study was to look at my practice to see what my students, their parents and I would experience if I focused on mediated learning as we collaboratively developed meta-strategic knowledge through the learning of CEA's Building Blocks of Thinking and Tools of Learning. I collected data through a reflective journal, audio recordings of student research team meetings, parents' focus group meetings, and individual exit interviews of students and their parents. I analyzed data in multiple ways to ensure validity. My students and I used the CEA approach during educational therapy and research team meetings. The findings showed that the students could use meta-strategic knowledge to develop learning strategies that were meaningful to them and transferable to other settings. The findings from parent meetings and interviews also showed that learning the CEA approach was helpful to them as they mediated their children's learning. Implications for future research focused on the possible need for more collaboration within the one-on-one educational therapy model, the need for parent training workshops, and the call for further research to validate the findings of this study. Suggestions for NILD's corporate use of these findings also were given.