Todd Twyman
Gerald Tindal

Students with disabilities often have difficulty understanding expository history texts in high school. This article presents an integrated curriculum/instruction/assessment approach to teaching history that increases content comprehension and problem-solving skills of students with learning disabilities in inclusive classrooms. Concept-based Instruction (CBI) adapts social studies curricula in three phases. First, texts are organized into concepts that have defining attributes, which are explicitly aligned to state standards. The concept/attribute structure is the rule set for students to access the implicit concepts in the text. Second, visual displays are used during instruction. The visual displays help students to focus their reading and represent consistent practice routines. Third, curriculum-based measures monitor student comprehension progress, and problem-solving questions assess knowledge application. CBI is flexible enough to be used in conjunction with any instructional method and helps teachers to be more efficient and effective to meet the range of abilities in inclusive classrooms.

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