1. C H A R A C T E R I S T I C S O F S T U D E N T S W I T H
M I L D / M O D E R A T E I N T E R V E N T I O N N E E D S
S P E D 4 / 5 3 0 5 0
I N S T R U C T O R : B R I A N F R I E D T
Week twelve:
Implications for teaching and learning
2. Where we’re going
This week:
Evidence-based practices in general
What they are
What they mean
Why we should seriously consider their use
Evidence-based practices specific to our areas of disability
Do they exist?
What are they?
In the very near future:
Interview presentation is due on December 4!
3. Evidence-based practice
A treatment or intervention that:
has a clear operational definition,
targets a socially valid student outcome or behavior,
is shown to positively affect target outcome by a sufficient
number of research studies that show experimental control.
experimental, quasi-experimental, single subject research
Essentially, EBPs are treatments or interventions
that good research suggests will work to affect
positive change in students in classroom settings.
4. Will EBPs always work?
No.
However, as a field, we probably ought to:
Use the treatment most likely to work first.
If that fails, move to the next most likely treatment.
And so on...
5. Do EBPs restrict teacher creativity?
Not really.
Good instruction still relies heavily on the specialized
knowledge of a teacher.
You have to know your students.
You have to know the characteristics of student disabilities.
You have to be able to get an EBP to work for you.
That said:
There are critical components to all treatments, things that
can’t be changed without throwing everything off.
Implementing EBPs with fidelity is important.
6. Why should we use EBPs?
We want to secure positive outcomes for our
students.
Academic
Social
Adaptive
Behavioral
EBPs have the support of research.
If we use them well, they can secure the outcomes that we want
for our students. That’s what they are supposed to do.
And. There’s a legislative imperative to do so.
7. Why shouldn’t we use EBPs?
Maybe things don’t generalize to other settings.
Maybe we can’t know stuff. Maybe there is no such
thing as an evidence-based practice.
For a much more refined statement of this position, see:
Gallagher, D.J. (1998). The scientific knowledge base of special
education: Do we know what we think we know? Exceptional
Children, 24, 304-314.
8. Current state of EBPs
Not used to as much as they could be in the field, for
a variety of reasons
Unclear what practices are evidence-based
No clear warehouse for EBPs; teachers don’t generally go into
the research to find them on their own
Teachers generally rely on personal or informal sources of
information to inform their practice
It’s harder to implement an EBP with fidelity than it is to do
something else
9. Readings...
Cook, B.G., Landrum, T.J., Tankersley, M., &
Kauffman, J.M. (2003). Bringing research to bear on practice:
effecting evidence-based instruction for students with
emotional or behavioral disorders. Education and Treatment
of Children, 26, 345-361.
Odom, S.L., Brantlinger, E., Gersten, R., Horner, R.H.,
Thompson, B., & Harris, K.R. (2005). Research in special
education: Scientific methods and evidence-based practices.
Exceptional Children, 71, 137-148.
10. More readings...
Four articles:
Lloyd, Kavale, and Forness (1999)
Broad overview of several meta-analyses
Landrum, Tankersley, and Kauffman (2003)
What works for students with EBD?
Vaughn and Linan-Thompson (2003)
What works for students with SLD?
Browder et al. (2006)
Reading instruction for students with CD
11. There is a lot of reading this week
Consider these ideas as you read:
How do the recommendations in this literature align with what
you already know about the characteristics of each disability
category?
How trustworthy, useable, and accessible is this information?
Have the researchers presented strategies that you could use in
an instructional setting?
Is this kind of thing important? As special educators, should
we be following the broad guidelines laid out here?