This paper analyses the special educational resources in the Swedish upper secondary schools using a total population survey that covers all upper secondary schools. Special educators and special teachers together constitute the special educational resources at each school. With two types of regression models (logistic and linear regression), the…

The high degree of overlap of race and poverty in our society has led to the presumption in both research and practice that ethnic disproportionality in special education is in large measure an artifact of the effects of poverty. This article explores relationships among race, poverty, and special education identification to arrive at a more…

A counterbalanced, multiple-baseline, across-subjects design was used to determine if attention and performance monitoring had differential effects on the on-task and spelling study behavior of 6 elementary students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the general education classroom. Both self-monitoring of attention and…

Research regarding children of intercountry adoption is limited, and most children of intercountry adoption have complex histories that may place them at risk for difficulty or failure in the classroom. Although the performances of some children from orphanage environments approximate those of chronological-age peers 2 to 4 years postadoption,…

Focus groups with teachers of students with learning disabilities (n=30) and teachers of students with emotional/behavior disorders (n=19) were conducted to examine the the teachers' perspectives about educational research and the extent to which they found research findings to be useful. The study further addressed the ways in which new practices…

In this article, the authors describe an alignment and content analysis of the Wisconsin Alternate Assessment (WAA) for students with disabilities. The WAA is an assessment of the academic performance of students with significant disabilities and is an alternative to the traditional on-demand achievement test. Alternate assessments like the WAA…

Policy and program decisions involve choices among different ways of preparing teachers. These choices are shrouded in increasingly contentious debates as teacher shortages reach crisis proportions. Yet, research on special education teacher education is almost nonexistent. Findings from comparative research documenting the characteristics of…

The current article investigates whether the mathematics achievement of students in special education can be used to identify those who share common cognitive skills that may not be in concordance with their disability labels. Latent class analysis of a comprehensive test of mathematics taken by fourth-grade students with various disabilities…

State assessment systems continue to evolve as federal requirements change and more students are included in the assessment systems. An examination of states' participation and accommodations policies in place at the beginning of the accountability requirements set by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 revealed that policies for both…

This study extended the work on curriculum-based measurement to examine the criterion-related validity of curriculum-based measures in written expression for middle school students, the differences in validity coefficients for various lengths of text, and the sensitivity of curriculum-based measures to change in student performance.…

In this article the author provides the context for the 5 years of research conducted by the National Center on Accelerating Student Learning (CASL) and an introduction to key aspects of the work of the researchers. The following topics are discussed: methodology, student responsiveness to interventions, explicit and pragmatic instruction,…

This article focuses on the research program on mathematical problem solving conducted by the Center on Accelerating Student Learning (CASL). First, a subset of CASL themes, illustrated in the mathematical problem-solving studies, is highlighted. Then, the theoretical underpinnings of the mathematical problem-solving intervention methods are…

This article describes the outcome and significance of studies in the area of writing conducted from 1999 to 2003 by the Center on Accelerating Student Learning (a multisite research center involving Vanderbilt University, Columbia University, and the University of Maryland). The basic purpose of the Center was to identify effective instructional…

The studies described here are designed to teach reading comprehension to at-risk students in the second and third grades. The focus is on text structure. First, there is an evaluation of a program that teaches students to identify themes of stories and apply those themes to real life; this instruction goes beyond the plot-level focus of typical…

In this article, we summarize a good portion of the CASL research program on reading in the early grades. We first describe investigations conducted in kindergarten, where our focus was on the development of decoding and word recognition. Then we discuss studies conducted in first grade, where we continued to emphasize decoding and word…