Free ILTS Learning Behavior Specialist I (290) Study Guide

Academic Development

Academic development refers to the progressive acquisition of knowledge and skills in content areas such as reading, writing, and mathematics. In early childhood, academic precursors include recognizing letters, counting objects, and understanding print concepts. By middle childhood, students are expected to decode multisyllabic words, compose organized paragraphs, and solve multi-step math problems. Academic milestones are strongly influenced by cognitive and language abilities; a student with a learning disability in reading, for example, may demonstrate age-appropriate oral reasoning while falling significantly behind peers in decoding and fluency.

• Pre-academic skills: Letter recognition, one-to-one correspondence in counting, understanding that print carries meaning
• Elementary benchmarks: Reading fluency at grade level, composing multi-paragraph texts, applying arithmetic operations
• Secondary benchmarks: Abstract reasoning in content areas, independent research skills, self-directed study habits

Teaching Application: When a fourth-grader with a specific learning disability reads at a first-grade level, the special educator compares performance to academic milestones to determine the magnitude of the gap and selects evidence-based interventions such as systematic phonics instruction to close it.

Cognitive Development

Cognitive development encompasses changes in thinking, reasoning, memory, attention, and problem-solving ability over time. Infants begin with sensory exploration, toddlers develop object permanence, preschoolers engage in symbolic play, and school-age children acquire logical reasoning. Students with intellectual disabilities may progress through the same cognitive stages but at a slower rate, while students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder may show age-appropriate reasoning yet struggle to sustain attention or organize tasks.

• Attention: The ability to selectively focus on relevant stimuli while ignoring distractions, progressing from brief attention spans in infancy to sustained focus in adolescence
• Memory: The capacity to encode, store, and retrieve information, including working memory that holds information for immediate use
• Executive function: Higher-order processes including planning, organizing, self-monitoring, and flexible thinking that mature gradually into early adulthood

Teaching Application: A special educator working with a student who has weak executive function might provide graphic organizers, checklists, and verbal cues to externally scaffold the planning and self-monitoring the student has not yet developed internally.

Physical and Motor Development

Physical development refers to changes in body size, proportions, and overall health, while motor development describes the progressive ability to control body movements. Motor skills are categorized as either gross motor or fine motor. Gross motor skills involve large muscle groups used for walking, running, jumping, and balancing. Fine motor skills involve small muscle groups used for writing, cutting, buttoning, and manipulating small objects. Physical and motor disabilities such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy can significantly limit both categories, requiring adaptive equipment and modified classroom activities.

• Gross motor sequence: Rolling over, sitting, crawling, walking, running, hopping, skipping
• Fine motor sequence: Grasping, releasing, pincer grip, scribbling, drawing shapes, writing legibly

Teaching Application: For a student with cerebral palsy who has limited fine motor control, the special educator may provide a slant board, adapted pencil grip, or assistive technology such as speech-to-text software so the student can demonstrate knowledge without being penalized by motor limitations.

Sensory Development

Sensory development is the maturation of the body's systems for receiving and processing information from the environment, including vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, vestibular input, and proprioception. Sensory impairments such as hearing loss or visual impairment can profoundly affect language acquisition, social interaction, and academic learning. Students with autism spectrum disorder frequently experience atypical sensory processing, responding to certain stimuli with either heightened sensitivity or unusually low responsiveness.

• Sensory processing: The neurological ability to organize and interpret sensory input from the environment in order to produce appropriate responses
• Vestibular sense: The internal sense that detects head position and movement, contributing to balance and spatial orientation
• Proprioception: The internal sense of body position and movement that allows a person to coordinate actions without visual guidance

Teaching Application: A special educator who notices a student covering their ears during fire drills, avoiding certain textures at lunch, or becoming agitated in crowded hallways may consult with an occupational therapist to develop a sensory diet that provides calming or alerting input throughout the school day.

Communication Development

Communication development involves the progressive ability to understand and express language, encompassing receptive language, expressive language, articulation, pragmatics, and nonverbal communication. Infants communicate through crying and cooing; toddlers produce single words and two-word combinations; preschoolers use complete sentences; and school-age children develop complex syntax, narrative ability, and metalinguistic awareness. Students with speech-language impairments, autism spectrum disorder, or hearing loss may require augmentative and alternative communication systems, direct language instruction, or sign language support.

• Receptive language: The ability to understand spoken, written, or signed messages received from others
• Expressive language: The ability to convey thoughts, needs, and ideas through spoken words, writing, signs, or gestures
• Pragmatics: The social rules of language use, including turn-taking, maintaining topic, adjusting language for the audience, and understanding nonliteral meanings

Teaching Application: A special educator supporting a nonverbal student may implement a picture exchange communication system to build functional requesting skills, then gradually expand the system to support commenting, asking questions, and social conversation.

Social-Emotional Development

Social-emotional development encompasses the ability to form relationships, regulate emotions, develop self-concept, and navigate social situations. Key milestones include attachment formation in infancy, parallel play in toddlerhood, cooperative play in the preschool years, peer group membership in middle childhood, and identity formation in adolescence. Students with emotional-behavioral disorders, autism spectrum disorder, or traumatic brain injury may experience significant challenges in reading social cues, managing frustration, or maintaining friendships, requiring explicit social-skills instruction and structured support.

• Self-regulation: The ability to manage one's emotions, behavior, and attention in response to situational demands
• Attachment: The emotional bond between a child and caregiver that serves as a foundation for trust, exploration, and later relationship formation
• Social cognition: The ability to interpret and predict other people's behavior, intentions, and emotions

Teaching Application: A special educator may use explicit instruction in emotion identification, role-playing scenarios, and structured social groups to help a student with autism spectrum disorder develop the social cognition needed to interpret peer body language and respond appropriately during collaborative classroom activities.

Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget proposed that children construct knowledge through active interaction with their environment and progress through four invariant stages. Each stage represents a qualitatively different way of thinking.

• Sensorimotor stage (birth-2 years): Learning through senses and motor actions; development of object permanence
• Preoperational stage (2-7 years): Symbolic thinking and language emerge; thinking is egocentric and perception-bound
• Concrete operational stage (7-11 years): Logical reasoning about concrete objects; mastery of conservation and classification
• Formal operational stage (11+ years): Abstract and hypothetical reasoning; systematic problem-solving

Schemas are mental frameworks that organize and interpret information. Children modify schemas through assimilation, integrating new experiences into existing schemas, and accommodation, modifying schemas when existing ones cannot explain new experiences.

Teaching Application: A special educator working with a student who has an intellectual disability and is functioning at the concrete operational stage should use hands-on manipulatives and real-world examples rather than relying on abstract lecture, even if the student's chronological age would typically place them in the formal operational stage.

Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory

Lev Vygotsky emphasized that cognitive growth occurs through social interaction and cultural tools, particularly language. His concept of the zone of proximal development describes the gap between what a learner can accomplish independently and what they can achieve with guidance from a more knowledgeable other. Scaffolding is the temporary, responsive support provided within this zone that is gradually removed as the learner gains competence.

• Zone of proximal development: The range of tasks a learner cannot yet perform alone but can accomplish with appropriate assistance
• More knowledgeable other: A person with greater understanding or skill who guides the learner, such as a teacher, parent, or peer
• Scaffolding: Temporary instructional support calibrated to the learner's current level that is systematically faded as competence increases

Teaching Application: A special educator pairs a student with a learning disability with a peer tutor for a reading comprehension task, models the strategy first, and then reduces prompts as the student begins to apply the strategy independently. This directly applies the principle of working within the student's zone of proximal capability.

Erikson's Psychosocial Development Theory

Erik Erikson described eight stages of psychosocial development spanning the entire lifespan. Each stage presents a central conflict that must be resolved for healthy personality growth. The stages most relevant to school-age children and adolescents include:

• Trust vs. Mistrust (birth-1 year): Consistent caregiving builds a sense of security and trust in the world
• Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt (1-3 years): Opportunities for safe exploration foster independence and self-confidence
• Initiative vs. Guilt (3-6 years): Encouragement of purposeful activity develops initiative and leadership
• Industry vs. Inferiority (6-12 years): Success in academic and social tasks builds competence; repeated failure can produce feelings of inadequacy
• Identity vs. Role Confusion (12-18 years): Exploring values, beliefs, and goals leads to a coherent sense of self

Teaching Application: A special educator recognizes that a student with a learning disability who consistently struggles with grade-level reading may develop feelings of inferiority during the industry-versus-inferiority stage. The educator intentionally provides tasks at the student's instructional level so that the student can experience genuine academic success alongside appropriately challenging work.

Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory

Urie Bronfenbrenner proposed that human development is shaped by nested environmental systems surrounding the individual. This theory is especially important for special educators because it highlights how factors well beyond the classroom affect a student's learning and behavior.

• Microsystem: The immediate settings in which the child directly participates, such as family, classroom, and peer groups
• Mesosystem: The interactions and connections between microsystems, such as parent-teacher communication or the relationship between home and school routines
• Exosystem: Settings the child does not directly experience but that influence the child's microsystems, such as a parent's workplace policies or school board decisions
• Macrosystem: The broader cultural values, laws, customs, and economic conditions that shape all other systems
• Chronosystem: The dimension of time, including historical events and life transitions that alter the child's developmental context

Teaching Application: When a student's behavior suddenly deteriorates, a special educator applies ecological thinking by investigating changes across systems: a recent family divorce (microsystem), loss of afterschool care (exosystem), or community violence (macrosystem), rather than assuming the cause lies solely within the child.

Behavioral and Social Learning Theories

Behavioral theories, rooted in the work of B. F. Skinner, explain learning through the principles of reinforcement and punishment. Positive reinforcement increases a behavior by adding a desired stimulus, while negative reinforcement increases a behavior by removing an aversive stimulus. Albert Bandura's social learning theory extended behaviorism by demonstrating that individuals also learn through observing and imitating models, a process called observational learning. Bandura further introduced the concept of self-efficacy, the belief in one's ability to succeed at a task, which strongly influences motivation and persistence.

• Positive reinforcement: Providing a rewarding consequence after a desired behavior to increase its future occurrence
• Observational learning: Acquiring new behaviors or modifying existing ones by watching a model perform them and noting the consequences
• Self-efficacy: A person's belief in their own capability to organize and carry out the actions needed to achieve a specific goal

Teaching Application: A special educator uses a token economy (positive reinforcement) to increase on-task behavior for a student with ADHD and also arranges for the student to observe a peer successfully using a self-monitoring checklist, building the student's belief that they too can manage their attention independently.

Cross-Domain Impact

Disabilities rarely affect a single domain in isolation. A hearing impairment, for example, directly limits auditory access to language, which in turn delays vocabulary growth, reading development, social interaction skills, and academic achievement. An intellectual disability affects cognitive processing speed and memory, with cascading effects on academic performance, self-regulation, and social competence. Special educators must assess the student's profile across all domains and design integrated supports.

• Primary effects: The direct consequences of the disability on the affected domain
• Secondary effects: The indirect consequences that arise when a primary deficit limits opportunities or access in other domains

Teaching Application: A student who is deaf may have age-appropriate cognitive ability but significantly delayed reading skills because the reading curriculum assumes phonological awareness built through hearing. The special educator addresses this by teaching reading through visual phonics or bilingual strategies using American Sign Language rather than assuming the student has a reading-specific learning disability.

Variability in Disability Impact

Two students with the same disability category can present very differently. The impact depends on the severity of the condition, the age of onset, whether the condition is progressive or stable, the presence of co-occurring conditions, and the quality and timing of interventions. A student diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder who received intensive early intervention may present with significantly stronger communication and social skills than a peer who did not have access to early services. This variability means special educators must always individualize assessment and instruction rather than relying on categorical assumptions.

Teaching Application: Rather than assigning all students with autism to the same social-skills curriculum, the special educator first evaluates each student's specific communication profile, sensory preferences, and social strengths to design individualized supports.

Developmental Delay Versus Developmental Difference

A developmental delay means the child is progressing through typical sequences but at a slower rate, as is often seen in mild intellectual disability. A developmental difference means the child is developing along an atypical trajectory, as seen in autism spectrum disorder, where social communication may develop in a qualitatively different way rather than simply being delayed. Distinguishing between these two patterns is critical because interventions that accelerate delayed skills may not be appropriate for skills that are developing along a fundamentally different path.

Teaching Application: For a student with a language delay, the special educator may provide more practice with typical language structures. For a student whose language differences include echolalia and scripted speech patterns, the educator uses functional communication training that builds on the student's existing strengths rather than treating the difference as an error to eliminate.

Family Roles and Dynamics

The family is the child's first and most enduring learning environment. Family structure, parenting style, sibling relationships, and the degree of family involvement in education all shape developmental outcomes. Families of children with disabilities often navigate additional stressors such as managing medical appointments, advocating for services, and coping with grief or uncertainty about the child's future. Special educators who build collaborative partnerships with families and respect diverse family structures are better positioned to support the whole child.

• Family systems perspective: The view that a change in any one family member's circumstances affects every other member, meaning a child's disability impacts the entire family unit
• Parent involvement: Research consistently links active family participation in education to improved academic, behavioral, and social outcomes for students with disabilities

Teaching Application: A special educator invites a student's grandparent, who serves as the primary caregiver, to participate in IEP meetings and shares progress updates using the family's preferred communication method, recognizing that "family" is defined by who fulfills caregiving roles, not by a single household structure.

Medical Conditions and Health Factors

Chronic medical conditions, genetic syndromes, prenatal exposure to toxins, traumatic brain injury, and medication side effects can all alter developmental trajectories. Conditions such as epilepsy, sickle cell disease, fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, and lead poisoning may produce cognitive, behavioral, and motor effects that directly influence school performance. Special educators collaborate with school nurses, physicians, and related service providers to understand how a student's medical profile interacts with learning needs and to monitor the effects of medications on attention, energy, and behavior.

Teaching Application: A special educator notices that a student with epilepsy becomes drowsy and inattentive every afternoon and consults with the school nurse to learn whether the timing correlates with anticonvulsant medication. The team then schedules the student's most demanding instruction in the morning when alertness is highest.

Culture and Language

Cultural backgrounds influence how families perceive disability, whether they seek formal services, how children communicate and behave in educational settings, and which developmental milestones are prioritized. Linguistic diversity adds another layer: students who are English learners may appear to have communication delays when they are actually progressing normally in their home language. Misidentification can lead to over-representation of culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education. Special educators must use culturally responsive assessment practices and distinguish between a language difference and a true language disorder.

• Culturally responsive practice: Instruction and assessment that respects and incorporates students' cultural and linguistic backgrounds into the learning process
• Language difference vs. language disorder: A language difference arises from exposure to a different home language and reflects normal bilingual or multilingual acquisition, while a language disorder is a genuine impairment present in all languages the student speaks

Teaching Application: Before referring a bilingual student for special education evaluation, the special educator gathers information about the student's performance in their home language, consults with a bilingual specialist, and ensures assessments are administered in the language that most accurately reflects the student's abilities.

Resilience and Protective Factors

Resilience is the capacity to adapt positively and maintain healthy functioning despite exposure to significant adversity or risk. Resilience is not an inherent trait that a child either has or lacks; rather, it develops through the interaction of individual characteristics and environmental supports called protective factors. Protective factors include at least one stable and supportive relationship with an adult, a sense of belonging in school, access to quality instruction, positive peer connections, and the development of self-regulation skills.

• Risk factors: Conditions that increase the likelihood of negative developmental outcomes, such as poverty, abuse, neglect, or chronic health conditions
• Protective factors: Conditions and relationships that buffer the negative effects of risk, such as a caring mentor, strong school community, and effective coping strategies

Teaching Application: A special educator intentionally builds a supportive classroom community, teaches coping strategies, and serves as a consistent caring adult for students who face multiple risk factors, thereby strengthening the protective factors that promote resilience.

Socioeconomic Circumstances

Socioeconomic status encompasses a family's income, education level, and occupational prestige. Children living in poverty are at heightened risk for developmental delays due to limited access to healthcare, nutritious food, enriching early learning experiences, and stable housing. Poverty intersects with disability in compounding ways: families with fewer financial resources may have difficulty accessing therapy services, assistive technology, or specialized childcare. At the same time, educators must avoid deficit thinking that equates economic disadvantage with incapacity. Many students from low-income backgrounds demonstrate remarkable strengths when given appropriate opportunities and support.

• Cumulative risk: The concept that the total number of risk factors a child experiences matters more than any single factor, with each additional stressor increasing the probability of negative outcomes
• Deficit thinking: An inaccurate belief system that attributes poor academic outcomes to inherent deficiencies in students or families rather than to systemic barriers and lack of opportunity

Teaching Application: A special educator avoids assuming that a student's academic struggles are solely disability-related by also considering whether the family has reliable transportation to therapy appointments, whether the student has a quiet place to complete homework, and whether nutritional needs are being met, then connects the family with community resources as appropriate.