Research has often focused on how teachers and educators can better instruct and accommodate students with disabilities. However, are the methods used to teach students with disabilities effective and inclusive for all students? Researchers at Michigan State University are some of the first to answer that question.
Professors and doctoral students from across MSU, including those in the College of Social Sciences and the College of Education, offer some of the first findings on how to differentiate the effectiveness of instruction for students with and without disabilities.
Their study suggests that to help schools make decisions that are best for student outcomes, policymakers may want to consider measures of teacher quality that look at these groups of students separately.
Published in the magazine Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, This research presents an important advance in understanding how to best measure the performance of students with and without disabilities.
“Most students with disabilities spend the majority of their school day in general education classrooms, but many teachers report that they receive insufficient training and preparation to educate these students,” said study author Scott Imberman, a professor in the Department. of Economics from the Faculty of Social Sciences. Sciences and the Faculty of Education. “We thought that by using statistical measures of teacher quality, we could identify which teachers are most effective with these students and how much the ability of general education teachers to instruct these students varies.”
It is important that students with disabilities have access to high-quality teachers, and not all teachers receive the training and skills necessary to support those students. They may also have more difficulty with certain subjects, such as math. Student success outcomes are also typically determined by the performance of the entire class rather than individual student performance.
When it comes to evaluating the success of all students, numerical measures known as value-added measures or VAMs are typically used. However, these measures often do not distinguish between assessing students with and without disabilities.
The MSU research team created a study using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District due to the large number of enrollees and students with disabilities. They created two specific value-added measures: one to evaluate the effectiveness of teachers instructing students with disabilities and the other for students without disabilities.
They found that some of the best-performing teachers for students without disabilities have lower value-added scores for students with disabilities. Similarly, they observed that teachers with better performance for students with disabilities have lower value-added scores for students without disabilities. This means that some students who seem to have a high-quality teacher may actually be better off with other teachers.
The biggest inequity, according to Imberman, is that although “some general education teachers have specialized skills that make them more effective for students with disabilities, our case study in Los Angeles suggested that disabled students are generally not matched with these teachers.” .
While the results do not identify how to better connect teachers with students with disabilities, they do raise the need for schools and policymakers to explore how both groups of students, and especially those with disabilities, can achieve better academically. It is also necessary that educators, especially those who have been teaching for longer, receive appropriate training to support students with disabilities.
“We hope that our methods can be used in the future to help school officials better connect students with disabilities with the teachers best prepared to instruct them and better assess which teachers might need additional training to educate disabled students,” Imberman said. .
In addition to Imberman, the research team included Katharine Strunk, dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania; Nathan Jones, associate professor in the Special Education program at Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education and Human Development; W. Jesse Wood, senior analyst at Abt Associates; Neil Filosa, doctoral student in the MSU Department of Economics; and Ijun Lai, Mathematica researcher.