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Abstract

This issue of Exceptional Children is devoted to a topic that has long concerned special educators: how students’ characteristics might predict sensitivity to instructional interventions. The idea that some students, depending on their personal characteristics, might benefit to a greater or lesser degree from educational practices begs educators to differentiate instruction. Indeed, it is the very foundation of special education: Educators identify students with disabilities so that they can provide those students with “specially designed instruction . . . to meet the unique needs of a child with a disability” (20 U.S.C. § 1401[29]). Successful differentiation of instruction on the basis of learner characteristics requires clear evidence that providing some students with one form of instruction and others with another form of instruction results in better outcomes for both groups. If differentiation is effective, then students from both groups would be better off than if everyone was to receive the same instruction. In research, the idea is often described by the technical term aptitude-by-treatment interaction, or ATI: Individuals with different aptitudes will benefit from different treatments. Educators have pursued evidence supporting the hypothesized benefits of ATIs for decades but with little success (Cronbach & Snow, 1977). Indeed, one of the most widely known examples of the pursuit of an ATI is the one based on the idea that modality learning styles should guide reading instruction (i.e., visual learners should be taught by methods that emphasize visual aspects of reading, but auditory learners should be taught by methods that emphasize auditory aspects of reading). As popular as this idea has been over the years (Arter & Jenkins, 1977) and around the world (Howard-Jones, 2014), research reveals that it repeatedly has not been proven (Arter & Jenkins, 1977; Kavale & Forness, 1987; Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, & Bjork, 2009). Does the failure to find benefits for learning styles and other similar ATIs invalidate the search for factors that might guide differentiation? Of course not. We may not find ATIs based on personological variables (e.g., left vs. right brain, impulsive vs. reflective, externalizing vs. internalizing; Willingham, Hughes, & Dobolyi, 2015), but that might be because we are looking in the wrong places. There may be factors (e.g., level of knowledge or skill at the onset of instruction) that differentiate among learners and that can guide instruction (Tobias, 1989). In this context, Douglas and Lynn Fuchs asked a simple question regarding what current research might reveal about differences in responsiveness to interventions. If researchers examined their data sets from large-scale studies, could they find differential responsiveness? They invited eminent scholars with similarly large data sets to collaborate in a coordinated investigation. These teams of researchers examined the data from their intervention studies and, using sophisticated statistical methods, searched for evidence about whether some characteristics of participating students might predict responsiveness to instruction. The series of special articles in this issue is the result. It reveals that there are hints about differentiation. Importantly, many of those hints align with the fundamentals of special education. For example, students with lower levels of entry skills may benefit differentially from powerful instruction (e.g., Clemens and colleagues, this issue; Coyne and colleagues, this issue). Thus, the studies in this special issue provide a foundation for validating special education’s foundational concept that some students may need different instruction than other students. 811447 ECXXXX10.1177/0014402918811447Exceptional ChildrenLloyd and Therrien editorial2018