Study On Applying The ICF-CY In The Individual Education Plan For Children With Special Educational Needs

In Special Education, Individual Education Plan (IEP) is the essential basis of making educational plan, organizing teaching activity and preparing learning environment and the basic rationale for educational evaluation as well as the indispensable condition of satisfying the demands of children with special educational needs. Putting IEP into practice has some difficulties. Firstly, in the process of assessment, most of the assessment work was done roughly and tend to be incomprehensive. Secondly, when making the goals in IEP, it seems too arbitrary to take all the demands for one’s development into consideration. Thirdly, in the stage of implementing, most of the IEP tended to be incompetent handling the teaching activity. ICF-CY is a new tool to assess children’s impairment, which emphasizes the comprehensive influence of body structure and function, activity and participation, and contextual factors while confirming one’s development level. It has some well-directed assistance and support to the defects of IEP. Therefore, how to using the ICF-CY to assess children’s function, ensure the effect of intervention and how to optimize IEP by understanding the pattern of how people’s health condition and environmental factors hinder or promote their life is widely studied. However, researchers still have doubts of implementing the ICF-CY into IEP. The following part is the doubts:(1) What’s the advantage and disadvantage of using the ICF-CY into IEP?(2) Is there any practical measure of implementing the ICF-CY into IEP?(3) Why could the ICF-CY advance the quality of IEP?(4) What extent of children’s functional improvement after using the ICF-CY into their IEP?The present study was to answer the above-mentioned questions in some extent by applying the ICF-CY in three children’s IEP. It consists of three parts:The first part is the research background. The problems of IEP in mainland, China and research actuality of the ICF-CY were introduced by analyzing, clearing up, and summarizing the data from searching for correlative reference.The second part is the main process of study. Two stages were included in this part. Firstly, using Delphi Method is to make individual ICF-CY checklist for different participants. Secondly, the ICF-CY checklists were used to guide the whole IEP process. Specifically, at the beginning step, three participants were evaluated by their checklist and some educational goals were figured out according to the evaluation results. Then, at the step of implementing IEP, some teaching and intervention measures were used to different child according to their own functional development needs. And at the reevaluation step, the checklist was used again for after-testing. Both the whole functional improvement and some behaviors (e.g. communication behavior, play behavior and problem behavior) related to particular functions were analyzed.The third part is discussion and conclusion based on the present study and4conclusions were reached in this study:(1) The applying of ICF-CY has significant effect on improving children’s function development.(2) Implementing the ICF-CY into IEP in the mainland China needs to combine the functional codes with the present curriculum goals and course modes.(3) Four main factors make the ICF-CY have positive impact on optimizing IEP, includes:a) the emphasis of environment, especially, the "positive environmental support" based on the ICF-CY; b) the decrease of label effect; c) compensating for other standard scale and making assessment in specific situation; d) the increase of the flexibility and dynamic when using IEP to guide teaching activity.(4) The ICF-CY has its own shortcomings in the application to IEP, including:a) it could be subjective in the process of choosing functional codes and assigning qualifier for each code; b) applying the ICF-CY asks the users receiving relevant training, and the extent of user’s understanding about the ICF-CY would influence the effects, so using the ICF-CY in IEP widely can be difficult; c) the functional code cannot writing in IEP directly.