How do special education-related professionals parenting children with disabilities experience the special education system? This qualitative exploratory study delves into the experiences of 25 mother-educators who are special education-related professionals navigating the special education system for their children with disabilities. Through thematic analysis, our findings elucidate how the special

In the U.S. education system, students of color experience multiple forms of marginalization at the intersection of markers of difference. These injustices manifest in multiple forms, such as higher rates of inappropriate referrals to special education, misidentification, conferring stigmatizing labels, and subsequently placing students of color in more segregated spaces. To combat this persistent

Sustained implementation of effective behavior support systems and practices is critical for improving academic and behavior outcomes for students with and without disabilities. Although implementation studies have identified variables facilitating sustained implementation of Tier 1 behavior support systems in schools, little research exists examining Tier 2 and 3 behavior support systems. The purpose

Teacher rating scales (TRS) often play a part in service eligibility decisions for gifted services. Although schools regularly use TRS to identify gifted students either as part of an informal nomination process or through behavioral rating scales, there is little research documenting the between-teacher variance in teacher ratings and the consequences of such rater dependence. To evaluate the possible

Engagement behaviors are crucial for school success and are often targeted for improvement in school-based interventions. It may be helpful for both researchers and school-based practitioners to understand the likely impacts of interventions on engagement behaviors (e.g., to understand the extent to which engagement behaviors might change with treatment). For single-case studies designed to answer

This study examined the diversity in feelings of loneliness among high-ability students. Individual differences (intelligence level, giftedness label, and personality) and differences in the social context (peer acceptance, peer rejection, victimization, and friendship quantity) of adolescents were considered as predictors of loneliness. Additionally, gender differences were investigated in both the

Professionals play an important role in when and how families access autism services. Black families often experience disparate access to autism services compared to White families. Family Peer Advocates (FPAs) are professionals who have personal experience with the diagnostic process, school-based supports, and community-based services, and provide training and support to families. Understanding the

This study investigated the typologies of teacher attitudes toward gifted students and gifted education, along with the predictors of such attitudes. For this purpose, surveys were administered to 339 teachers employed in a large faith-based school system in Australia. Analyses including factor analysis and latent profile analysis were performed on the data. In the end, four distinct profiles of teacher

Replications provide credibility by demonstrating under what conditions experimental findings can be repeated, the premise behind evidence-based practices. Replications in single-case research also investigate generalization of findings across groups. For groups with high variability, such as individuals with autism, assumptions of generalizability should be based on learners who are similar in critical

Despite growing calls to increase diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, students with learning disabilities (SWLDs) remain underrepresented in STEM at the postsecondary level. Considering this call for increased diversity as a means to expand and strengthen STEM success, we used the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to explore how participation in engineering

Informed by disability critical race theory (DisCrit), this phenomenological study explored the perspectives of Black parents of young adults with high-incidence disabilities regarding their experiences with their children's postsecondary planning processes. Fourteen Black parents participated in semistructured interviews and shared recommendations for educator practices. Five overarching themes emerged

Word problem-solving is one major area in mathematics that has been identified as being particularly challenging for students, specifically for those with learning disabilities (LDs) and emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). This study aims at evaluating the effects of a strategic math intervention with concept maps on the ability to solve word problems (addition and subtraction problems, number

Restraint and seclusion (R/S) are practices employed by schools to address severe student behavior. Although the use of R/S has been shown to have harmful impact for students, staff, and schools, there is no federal law that addresses its use in schools. A lack of a universal approach leaves each state to determine its own legislation and policy. The current study seeks to extend previous research

The purpose of this quantitative systematic literature review was to identify and describe published mathematics studies from 1980 to 2021 that incorporated a self-monitoring component ( k = 22 studies; N = 1,787 students). We examined specific self-monitoring procedures, instructional contexts, implementation variables, and methodological quality. For inclusion, studies needed to (a) include self-monitoring

Under federal law, parents have the right to decline, or waive, English language support services when their child is identified as an English learner (EL) in school. In this study, we focus on this important subgroup of ELs—referred to as waived ELs—at the understudied intersection of EL status and special education (SPED) status. Using longitudinal statewide Tennessee data from 2010 to 2021, we used

In this secondary analysis of a previously conducted systematic review, we analyze social validity assessments in intervention research for transition-age autistic youth. Social validity is concern...

Although quality guidelines for single-case intervention research emphasize the importance of concurrent baselines in multiple-baseline and multiple-probe designs, nonconcurrent variations on these...

The central obligation under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act is to provide each eligible student with a free appropriate public education (FAPE). In Endrew F. v. Douglas County Scho...

The purpose of this study is to present a set of empirically derived effect size distributions in order to provide field-based benchmarks for assessing the relative effects of interventions aimed a...

Group design research studies can provide evidence to draw conclusions about what works, for whom, and under what conditions in special education. The quality indicators introduced by Gersten and c...

The formula used to allocate federal funding to states for special education is one of IDEA's most critical components. The formula serves as the primary mechanism for dividing available federal do...

Twice-exceptionality (2e), broadly defined as the co-occurrence of a gift or talent and a disability, has been a part of the educational lexicon since the 1990s, although its empirical backing is l...

Open practices, such as preregistration, registered reports, open materials, open data, open analytic code, replication, open peer review, open access, and conflict-of-interest and funding statemen...

High-quality systematic literature reviews provide a systematic process for identifying, synthesizing, and critiquing multiple studies and, in turn, inform theory, research, practice, and policy. W...

Children with complex communication needs (CCN) who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) often need more time to process and respond when communicating with others. This study emplo...

The purpose of the current study was to conceptually replicate a multi-indicator construct of economic hardship in a national sample of adolescents with and without disabilities (N = 9,230). Using ...

Mixed-methods research (MMR) holds promise for investigating several empirical questions within special education, capitalizing on the strengths of quantitative and qualitative traditions. We prese...

Secondary data analyses occur when new analyses are proposed for existing data. Although they are prevalent in special education research, there is little guidance on how to prepare secondary data ...

Single-case design has a long history of use for assessing intervention effectiveness for children with disabilities. Although these designs have been widely employed for more than 50 years, recent...

This study's first purpose was to investigate effects of a fourth- and fifth-grade “next-generation” fraction intervention, which included six enhancements over a previously validated fraction inte...

Executive function (EF), a set of neurocognitive processes, is central to students’ emotional and behavioral well-being. Despite students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) being at risk...

The purpose of this study was to examine the efficacy of a teacher-implemented professional development program to increase the fidelity with which paraeducators use evidence-based practices (EBPs)...

For this first issue of the last volume year in our editorship, we are pleased to provide a diverse set of studies. Not only do the contents of this issue represent students from kindergarten to college preparatory ages, and topics ranging from math, reading, and transition, but also we have two studies that made extensive use of open science practices and two reported by international scholars.

Exceptional Children first published online March 12, 2021, published in print April 1, 2021 doi: 10.1177/0014402921990890

Schema instruction improves word-problem solving for students with mathematics difficulty (MD; e.g., Powell et al., 2015); however, prior research suggests that students need word-problem-specific ...

Special education teachers of color are underrepresented in research about attrition and retention, despite evidence of their role in the academic, social, and emotional success of students of colo...

Little is known about how the expansion of state pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs affects low-income children with disabilities in Head Start. Using almost 30 years of administrative data of all H...

School-to-work transition is a challenging period for youth with learning difficulties (LD). Based on self-determination theory (SDT), we tested the role of autonomy support and motivation in predi...

We used time-varying effect modelling of two very large samples of fourth-grade students (Nreading = 148,240, Nmathematics = 152,220) to investigate associations between adoption and over-time impl...

As educators and policymakers increasingly use parental involvement as a mechanism to increase student achievement, scholars know surprisingly little about the disparities in frequencies of parenta...

Viewed through a social justice lens, preschool expulsion is an educational equity issue. This study focused on prior expulsion from preschool and child-care in a longitudinal study of 203 autistic...

There is growing evidence that school starting age impacts children's likelihood of receiving special education services, but less is known about variations in this effect. Using a regression disco...

Mathematical problem solving has been identified as one foundational area of mathematics for all students but is an area of weakness for students with disabilities. This investigation sought to determine the effects of peer-delivered schema-based instruction on the mathematical problem solving of the change problem type with four middle school students with extensive support needs using a single-case

Previous research illustrated that reading comprehension and science performance correlate highly. Because students with specific learning disorders with impairments in reading (SLD-IR) show deficits in reading comprehension, they may struggle to perform in science. As language in science is characterized by linguistic complexity, the question arises whether students with SLD-IR can be supported by

Proportional reasoning is the cornerstone of many higher-level mathematics topics. We evaluated the sustainability effects of schema-based instruction (SBI) on proportional reasoning and the impact of professional development (PD) on the instructional practices of two cohorts of seventh-grade teachers (i.e., SBI-experienced-teacher implementers, who taught SBI in a previous study; SBI-novice-teacher

In this study, we examined college and career readiness (CCR) support for students with and without disabilities using data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2012. We selected variables relevant to CCR and focused on the interaction of disability, race and ethnicity, and household income across a range of disability categories, including those on individualized education programs and

Past research has established clear educational inequities between young people with disabilities and their peers. In part, some of these inequities may be attributed to expectations. In this study, we examined whether parental expectations were related to school functioning at high school, with school functioning broadly defined as ease and frequency of engagement in school-based activities. Using

We replicated a study of a kindergarten mathematics intervention, ROOTS, delivered in the context of a research-based core program. We randomly assigned 62 classrooms to treatment (ROOTS) or a business-as-usual control. All classrooms implemented the research-based core program (Early Learning in Mathematics). Participants included 163 treatment students and 145 control students nested within classrooms

Research supports the efficacy of intensive literacy instruction for children with moderate intellectual disabilities and Down syndrome (DS). However, much of the literature features measures closely aligned with evaluated interventions. Despite their increasing role in instruction, curriculum-based measures (CBM) are rarely featured in reading studies involving DS. Increasing the use of CBM in research

We examined the association between the percentage of students with disabilities (SWD) in general education teachers’ classes and their likelihood of turnover, investigating potential internal and external resources (certification, experience, preparation, classroom management, and working conditions) as moderators and disaggregating types of teacher mobility. Before accounting for other variables

We used survey and administrative data from Washington State to assess the degree to which special education teacher preparation, district literacy instructional practices, and the alignment between preparation and practice were associated with the reading test score gains of students with high-incidence disabilities taught by early-career special education teachers in Grades 4 to 8. These students

A wide research base has documented the disproportional enrollment in K-12 special education and gifted and talented services across racial and socioeconomic lines. This study extends that knowledge base by integrating multiple population-level datasets to better understand predictors of access to and enrollment in gifted and talented services and tested whether these variables remained predictive

We are pleased to present this issue of Exceptional Children. The issue includes articles examining diverse topics: policies, practices, and parents’ perceptions.

We propose using Stochastic Frontier Analysis to estimate pupils’ academic underachievement. We model underachievement as the gap between expected achievement and actual achievement, not due to a learning disability. Our data are a panel for 2,228 Belgian pupils observed over 6 years of primary education. We found that the average underachievement gap is 23.5%. That is, the average pupil does not exploit

Black–White disparities in gifted enrollment persist across U.S. school systems. In this study, we examined whether these disparities depend on county-level rates of anti-Black bias. We drew data from the Civil Rights Data Collection, the Education Opportunity Project, and the Race Implicit Association Database. Based on a series of heteroskedastic fractional probit regression models, we found that

Schools bear the burden of funding the majority of the services received by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with the assumption that spent resources will result in meaningful positive outcomes for these students. Interventions lacking empirical support remain popular in schools despite lacking or limited evidence that students will experience positive outcomes. Economic evaluation methods

The purpose of this study was to develop programed instruction in orientation and mobility for multiply impaired blind children. Scales were developed for each of four major areas: motor development, sensory training, concept development, and mobility skills. Programed instruction was written for each of these scales. The programed instruction was validated with 40 multiply impaired blind children

A consistently remarkable relationship between role taking ability and prosocial behaviors was posited to support the theoretical construct of psychosocial giftedness. Role taking tasks were given to gifted 3 year olds (mean IQ = 134) in the fall and spring. During the same period observations were made of their prosocial behaviors—sharing, helping, reacting to distress, and physical affection. In