When teaching children with intellectual disabilities, what type of objects or…

Concept: Teaching a new concept to learners with intellectual disability is normally planned as a progression from concrete, through semi-concrete (representational), to abstract. The concept is first met as direct multisensory experience with material the learner can handle; flat representations such as photographs and drawings stand in for that material next; language and symbols, which only point at the concept, come last. Intellectual disability involves limitations in both intellectual functioning and adaptive behaviour, and among its usual consequences for learning is difficulty with abstraction and symbolic manipulation, which is why guidance for these learners places the initial teaching load on concrete material. How far and how fast a particular learner moves along the progression is adapted to the learner, the concept and the task, and a learner who already commands the relevant language or picture-reading skills may move quickly; what this guidance recommends for a first encounter with a new concept is nonetheless the concrete stage.

Application: The stem fixes the moment as the introduction of a new concept, so the required material is whatever occupies the first stage of that progression.

1. Begin with the actual article itself — an apple, a coin, a spoon, a school bag. The learner looks at it, picks it up, turns it over and uses it, so shape, weight, texture, sound and function are experienced directly rather than reported.

2. Once that concrete referent is stable, move to semi-concrete stand-ins for the same article, such as photographs, pictures and simple line drawings. A three-dimensional model that the learner can still pick up and handle belongs with the concrete material; it is the flat, non-manipulable representation that marks the move upward.

3. The symbolic layer is added later: the spoken word, the written word, and signs that stand for the concept without resembling it.

Cross-check: Looking at the other stages shows why the recommendation starts where it does, because each of them typically calls on learning that a first encounter with an unfamiliar concept cannot be assumed to have supplied:

• A written description can rebuild a concept only for a learner who is already able to decode it in language, so it leans on the symbolic layer.

• An abstract symbol carries no resemblance to what it names, so it leans on a concept the learner already holds.

• A complex diagram carries several parts and relations on a flat surface, so it leans on both the concept and the visual-analysis skill needed to unpack a representation.

Each of those assumes something that a first encounter with an unfamiliar concept may not yet have supplied. For introducing a new concept to these learners, therefore, the material used first is the real object — the genuine, handleable article from the child’s own environment.