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We welcome you to this discussion! We are passionately interested in studying, using, inventing, and evaluating effective teaching practices for students with special needs. We hope you'll join us and the thousands of other teachers around the world who are similarly dedicated to improving instruction for the students who are difficult to teach.
To help you focus on gleaning the essence of what the research says about effective teaching for students with special needs, consider these questions.
2. What is effective teaching according to special education researchers?
3. What do they have in common?
4. How do they differ?
1. What is effective teaching according to general education researchers?
General education researchers and practitioners are vitally interested in the answer to Question 1 primarily because more than 70% of all students with special education needs are educated by general education teachers! Yes! As noted by Thousand and Villa (in press), by 1993, almost every state was implementing inclusion at some level (Webb, 1994). The National Study of Inclusive Education (1995) identified inclusive education activities in every state; in large and small districts across urban, suburban and rural settings; at all grade levels; and involving students with the full range of disabilities across the entire range of severity.
A decade ago, Wang, Reynolds, and Walberg (1987) conducted a large scale meta-analysis of the factors that positively affect student learning. These researchers found that, "[r]esearch in psychology and education has made great strides, particularly during the last decade, in delineating the characteristics of special needs students, and this progress has been paralleled by the development of educational provisions that effectively adapt to student differences" (p. 113).
This
is good news! It is good news for those of us who are general education
teachers because we must teach the 70% of all students with special needs!
Findings on the effects of instruction on learning were of particular interest
to these researchers. What teaching practices or instructional management
systems specifically were found to be effective? Before we answer, you
might be interested in how general education researchers conduct
their analyses.
The concept of effect sizes important to understand how the researchers determined which effective teaching practices had the most impact on the quality of instruction. To understand effect size, recall how the normal distribution (the bell curve) is shaped. General education researchers typically collected measures of student learning under control and experimental conditions. Students were matched by age, intellectual abilities, and where possible, socio-economic conditions, and other variables known to affect learning outcomes. Individual scores were averaged to generate a class mean; the means of the control and experimental groups were then compared through statistical analyses. The control group scores and mean were then plotted on a normal distribution curve and compared to the experimental group scores and mean. Counting the number of tenths of standard deviation points from the control group mean and the experimental group mean provided the effect size.
For example, these researchers reported an effect size of 17 for the effective teaching practice of providing positive reinforcement. An effect size of 10 was found for acceleration of learning, reading training, and providing cues and feedback. Science mastery learning and cooperative learning each achieved an effect size of 8. Tutoring achieved an effect size of 4.
The question that to ask yourself is, "If I can move the class mean up by that number of tenths of a standard deviation by using any one of these identified effective teaching practices, is it worth my effort to learn and use that system? If I use positive reinforcement systematically, I can expect an effect size of 17. In other words, just by using positive reinforcement alone, I would effectively eliminate the lowest scores in the normal distribution. My students' grades under a positive reinforcement system would systematically increase when compared to their grades under a system with no positive reinforcement." These results would be expected in any mastery learning system and have been well documented in the mastery learning literature: that is, grades of As and Bs increase; grades of Ds and Fs decrease.
The researchers also identified some teaching practices that yielded moderate or minimal effects on learning. This is important to consider because many of those practices are popular. For example, computer -assisted instruction yielded an effect size of only 2 tenths of a standard deviation. Yet, intuitively we believe that computer-assisted instruction is effective for many students with special needs. Similarly, the procedure known as homogeneous grouping yielded an effect size of 1 tenth of a standard deviation--practically no effect at all! Yet homogeneous grouping continues to be a favored practice of many educators.
In summary, researchers agree that there are many effective teaching practices that general educators can use to positively affect the learning of their students with special needs:
___
References Cited in Lecture
Forness, S., Kavale, K., Blum, R., & Lloyd, J. (1997). Mega-analysis of meta-analyses: What works in special education and related services. Teaching Exceptional Children, 29(6), 4-10.
National Study of Inclusive Education (1995). NY: The City University of New York, National Center on Educational Restructuring and Inclusion.
Thousand, J., & Villa, R. (in press). From islands of hope to mainlands of opportunity. The Journal of School Psychology Review: Inclusion Mini-Series.
Webb, N. (1994). Special education: With new court decisions behind them, advocates see inclusion as a question of values. The Harvard Educational Letter, 10(4), 1-3.
Wang, M., Reynolds, M., & Walberg, H. (1987). Handbook of special education research and practice. Oxford, England: Pergamon Press.
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