36 SCIENCE SCOPE Three Keys to Success in Science for Students With Learning Disabilities by Erica Kaldenberg, William Therrien, Sarah Watt, Jay Gorsh, and Jonte Taylor R udy is a 12-year- old boy with a learning disabil- ity (LD). This is his first year in middle school and, although he still has difficulty navigat- ing the large school, he en- joys the increased freedom and responsibility. However, Rudy isn’t looking forward to Friday because midterm progress reports will be sent home to his parents. Despite his best efforts, Rudy knows he is strug- gling in his life science class. In elementar y school Rudy enjoyed science, particularly learning about insects. Unfortunately, as the vocabulary and concepts have become more difficult for him to understand, he has withdrawn from participating and actively learning in his science class. (Please note that Rudy is a fictional character.) The middle school science curriculum used at Rudy’s school is inquiry based, which is much dif- ferent from the traditional textbook instruction that was used at his elementary school. Because Rudy is not reading at grade level, this inquir y approach has reduced some of his previous anxiety associated with reading the textbook. Still, Rudy struggles with some of the procedural aspects of the scientific investigations. His teach- ers have also noticed that he is having a hard time synthesizing the information from the hands-on activities into main ideas as well as determining the mean- ing of many of the vocabu- lary words. Sometimes he also struggles with making basic decisions, such as how he should display the results he found from an investigation. Un- fortunately, in his inquiry science class- room, Rudy now spends most of his time in science as a spectator while others are actively engaged. As a result, he has not gained a strong understanding of the course content. Students who struggle in science On average, students with LDs score almost one standard deviation lower than students without disabilities on science achievement tests (An- derman 1998). Similarly, 4th-, 8th-, and 12th- grade students with disabilities scored signifi- cantly lower than their nondisabled peers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress science test (NCES 2011). BIG IDEAS MNEMONICS