Classroom inclusion helps disabled.

• Position: YOUR LIFE

The secret to boosting the language skills of preschoolers with disabilities may be to put them in classrooms with typically developing peers, maintains a study in Psychological Science. Researchers found that the average language skills of a child's classmates in the fall significantly predicted the child's language skills in the spring--especially for those with disabilities.

"The results support inclusion policies in schools that aim to have students with disabilities in the same classrooms alongside their typically developing peers," says study coauthor Laura Justice. "Students with disabilities are the ones who are affected most by the language skills of the other children in their class."

In fact, after one year of preschool while surrounded by highly skilled peers in their classroom, children with disabilities had language skills comparable to students without disabilities. 'The biggest problem comes when we have a classroom of children with disabilities with no highly skilled peers among them," explains Justice. "In that case, they have limited opportunity to improve their use of language."

For those children with disabilities who were in classrooms with the most highly skilled peers, language scores in the spring were about 40% better than those of children with disabilities who were placed with the lowest-ranked peers. Students who had no disabilities showed about a 27% difference in scores between those with the highest-ranked peers and the lowest-ranked peers. While all children's language skills were affected somewhat by the skill levels of their classmates, the effect was strongest for those with disabilities.

This study...