HRD-9800287, Promoting Assets and Access Project, Educational Development Center (EDC)
Standards-based reform is bringing increased rigor and quality into mathematics and science education, but for a variety of reasons, those reforms have not been fully available to students with physical, developmental, and learning disabilities. The result is limited participation and achievement by students with disabilities, and a denial of both the scientific and human enterprise of talent and contribution. Further, both our reform rhetoric and the health of science demand that high quality education be available to all students, and exclusion of whole groups from opportunities to excel is not an issue of equity but rather a failing in our definitions of excellence.
The overall purpose of the project is to promote high quality, standards-based mathematics and science education for students with disabilities. The Center for Children and Technology of EDC, in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, will demonstrate for educators how all students can learn, a central idea in the standards, can be translated into each students will achieve. To accomplish this goal, the project is undertaking two major activities: (1) the development, implementation, evaluation and dissemination of model activities and materials for both inclusive and separate education settings; and (2) closely collaborate with individual and organizations involved in school reform and advocacy, including the standards committees.
The focus in this project is Grades K-4. The project is a significant effort to make standards-based education accessible to students with disabilities through the improvement of policy and practice.
