"We are excited to offer you the fourth edition of Exceptional Students: Preparing Teachers for the 21st Century. The field of education has evolved into one that requires collaboration among families, communities, and schools. Within schools, special and general educators must collaborate to be effective and efficient in teaching and responding to the demands of new standards, statewide assessments, and calls for education reform. In this fourth edition of Exceptional Students: Preparing Teachers for the 21st Century, we have refined and updated our content to reflect the role of the special educator while continuing to address the role of the general educator in serving special populations. The fourth edition includes updated references and photographs, changes to the content emphases and discussions to reflect current thought and practice, and additions/ deletions of tables and figures to also reflect current thought. The following section, New Additions to the fourth Edition, outlines more specifics. We would like to stress that this text includes information from DSM-5, the latest from the AAIDD, and other important publications and references that define and influence the field of special education. We are grateful to the instructors and students who have given us their feedback on the text. Their classroom experiences inspired suggested refinements that we incorporated throughout the third edition"--