The National Council on Disability (NCD) is an independent federal agency making recommendations to the President and Congress on issues affecting Americans with disabilities. NCD is comprised of a team of fifteen Presidential appointees, an Executive Director appointed by the Chairman, and twelve, full-time professional staff.
Student learning communities (SLCs) are a collection of activities organized by common goals that a group of students complete together. One major postsecondary Midwestern institution has been using SLCs as a tool to recruit students with disabilities to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. They have developed two levels of SLCs for use with high school and college students:
In the Phoenix Reading Project, Jerry Powell, a special education teacher at Sugar-Salem High School in Sugar City, Idaho, is using scan/read technology to help his students successfully complete reading assignments and exams in their core academic classes. Students with a variety of disabilities that include learning disabilities, health impairments, hearing impairments, autism spectrum disorders, and developmental disabilities have had increased access to textbooks and other printed material because of the hardware and software Mr.
SciTrain University (SciTrain U) provides both in-person and web-based training for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) faculty. Funded as an Office of Postsecondary Education demonstration project SciTrain U is hosted by the Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Georgia.
Tod Harris, a math and computer teacher at Maplewood Middle School in Edmonds, Washington, is committed to the universal design of classroom environments. His school serves students with visual impairments from throughout the district in general education classrooms. Some students were having difficulty accessing information projected on an overhead during class lectures and completing tasks in the math computer lab.
The following statistics were gathered by the National Center on Education Statistics (NCES), Special Education Regulation, in 2001.
Undergraduate research fellowships (URFs) can have a transformative effect on students with disabilities entering science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) fields. At the Eastern Alliance for Students with Disabilities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics2 (EAST-2) URFs were funded opportunities for students to propose research and collaborate with faculty mentors at the University of Southern Maine (USM).
In a study funded by the National Science Foundation's Research in Disabilities Education (RDE) program, a group of three postsecondary institutions used asynchronous online access as a universally designed method of content delivery. In addition to classroom lecture, web-based access to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) course content was also offered.
The Alliance for Access to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (AccessSTEM), which is funded by the National Science Foundation created an Accessibility Review Competition as a way to improve the accessibility of local science education programs and to develop the leadership skills of students with disabilities.
Speech impairments alone generally do not interfere with most computer use. However, advanced computer-based speech synthesizers are close enough to human quality to act as substitute voices and thus provide a compensatory tool for students who cannot communicate verbally. Students with portable systems can participate in class discussions once adapted computers provide them with intelligible speaking voices.
