Elizabeth Talbott

Can Middle School Students with Serious Reading Difficulties Help Each Other and Learn Anything

This investigation was intended to examine the effects of teaching middle school students with learning disabilities and mild mental retardation to tutor one another in reading comprehension strategies. All students were reading significantly below grade level and many students exhibited behavior problems in addition to their primary disability area. Students were randomly assigned to a tutoring or traditional reading instruction condition. Within the tutoring condition, students were matched into tutoring dyads, trained in the tutoring procedures, and taught specific reading comprehension strategies. Reciprocal tutoring was employed, such that students assumed roles of both tutor and tutee during daily reading periods. Performance on reading comprehension tests following tutoring yielded significant performance advantages for students involved in tutoring. Observational, survey, and interview data revealed that students enjoyed tutoring more than their traditional instruction, appeared to see the value and benefits of the tutoring, and wanted to include tutoring as part of their other classes, such as science and social studies. Findings are discussed with respect to the strengths and challenges associated with the use of tutoring to provide strategic instruction to students with special learning needs.

Somebody Else Making Somebody Else Fight: Aggression and the Social Context Among Urban Adolescent Girls

This study explored episodes of social and physical aggression among members of a low-income, urban sample of adolescent girls. Thirty African American, Hispanic, and Latina girls were interviewed about recent episodes of conflict, disagreement, or fighting in their grade. The study explored (a) the relationship between episodes of physical aggression and social aggression, (b) the importance of group alliances during aggressive episodes, and (c) the resolution of social and physical aggression. Episodes of social aggression frequently led to episodes of physical aggression among these girls, with group alliances solidified in the process. Adults intervened to resolve episodes of physical aggression (using suspension from school), whereas precipitating episodes of social aggression remained unresolved. Adolescents reported that suspension was an acceptable form of conflict resolution.

The Role of Social Contexts and Special Education in the Mental Health Problems of Urban Adolescents

We explored the perceptions that youth with and without self-reported mental health problems had of their social contexts (family, peer, and school) and the extent to which youth with mental health problems had received special education services in school. We examined data for 4,088 urban youth with self-reported externalizing, internalizing, comorbid, and no mental health problems in early adolescence. With regard to family context, students with comorbid problems reported significantly lower scores for parent attention to misbehavior than students without mental health problems, and students with internalizing problems reported significantly less positive parent—child relations than those with externalizing problems. With regard to peer context, students with externalizing and comorbid problems reported that significantly greater numbers of their friends were involved in risky behavior than did members of the other groups. With regard to school context, students with internalizing and comorbid problems reported feeling more anonymous and less well-liked by peers and teachers than students with externalizing problems. Significantly more internalizers and members of the comorbid group were in special education classes than expected. The majority of the students with self-reported mental health problems received services for learning disabilities.

Special Educators as Intervention Specialists: Dynamic Systems and the Complexity of Intensifying Intervention for Students With Emotional and Behavioral Disorders.

We present a dynamic systems perspective for the intensification of interventions for students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). With this framework, we suggest behavior involves the contributions of multiple factors and reflects the interplay between the characteristics of the student and the ecologies in which he or she is embedded. Building from a discussion of the application of dynamic systems theory to ecological intervention, we propose four types of data are needed to guide intervention intensification: universal/probabilistic knowledge and strategies, implementation science practice elements, person-oriented developmental analysis, and person-in-context interactional analyses. We discuss practice implications and propose two types of specialists: intervention specialists who provide direct services and have expertise adapting interventions across the academic, behavioral, and social domains and intervention specialist coordinators who direct intervention intensification activities across service sectors and design and monitor long-term intervention plans focused on developmentally relevant outcomes. Finally, we consider implications for research and professional development.

A Bayesian nonparametric meta-analysis model

In a meta-analysis, it is important to specify a model that adequately describes the effect-size distribution of the underlying population of studies. The conventional normal fixed-effect and normal random-effects models assume a normal effect-size population distribution, conditionally on parameters and covariates. For estimating the mean overall effect size, such models may be adequate, but for prediction, they surely are not if the effect-size distribution exhibits non-normal behavior. To address this issue, we propose a Bayesian nonparametric meta-analysis model, which can describe a wider range of effect-size distributions, including unimodal symmetric distributions, as well as skewed and more multimodal distributions. We demonstrate our model through the analysis of real meta-analytic data arising from behavioral-genetic research. We compare the predictive performance of the Bayesian nonparametric model against various conventional and more modern normal fixed-effects and random-effects models.

Quality Indicators for Reviews of Research in Special Education

ABSTRACT Reviews of research in special education have a unique place in the scientific literature, with the potential to inform a broad audience about the effectiveness and acceptability of assessment and intervention strategies for a heterogeneous group of children and youth. Results from reviews are useful to school leaders, practitioners, parents, policymakers, grant funders, researchers, journal editors, and reviewers. Despite an international movement toward the implementation of evidence-based practices, which includes quality indicators for reviews of research, the field of special education has not yet embraced its own set of review indicators. In this manuscript, we make the case for and propose a set of quality indicators for special education, with the goal of making all reviews in the field trustworthy, transparent, and systematic. Attaining a high level of quality in research reviews will then help researchers guide consumers to select the most effective interventions for youth with disabilities.

Research and Policy on Disability Linking Special Education to Developmental Science

Bridging special education (SE) and developmental science recognizes their shared focus on individual adaptation, growth, and outcomes. Adaptation continuously aligns the proclivities of students and the opportunities of their contexts. Considerations for the adaptation of students with disabilities include developmental malleability, problem behavior, intervention supports, and SE services. Policy implications center on the need to focus on the individual in context in both research and intervention, merge data from the implementation of intensive interventions and person-oriented analysis to establish comprehensive frameworks that include a focus on neurophysiological processes, and train the next generation of SE leaders in intensive interventions and applied developmental science.

Quality Indicators for Systematic Reviews in Behavioral Disorders

Special education researchers, practitioners, and policy makers continue to work toward developing and implementing empirically supported practices and policies to address the academic, social, and postschool challenges confronting students with emotional and behavioral disorders. The systematic review has become an essential vehicle for compiling and disseminating research findings on an array of topics. Given the importance and impact of these research summaries, it is instructive to take stock of the extent to which reviews in our field adhere to current standards. Drawing from a number of sources in the social and behavioral sciences, we propose and describe a series of quality indicators for systematic reviews. We applied these indicators to systematic reviews published in Behavioral Disorders between 2005 and 2016 with the broader goal of identifying areas of methodological strength and areas for improvement. Results indicate that the sample of systematic reviews demonstrated particular strength in several procedural domains such as the specification of inclusion criteria, identifying the electronic databases used for the search, and describing the plan for data analysis. We also identified a number of areas to which researchers might devote greater attention to increase the rigor of systematic reviews in the field. Findings are contextualized within the importance of research transparency and reporting to improve practice and policy.

Using Single-Subject Research Methodology to Study Learning Disabilities

Single-subject research requires repeated, trustworthy measurement of dependent variables and repeated manipulation of one or more independent variables to establish lawful relationships between the dependent and independent variables and to discredit alternative explanations for that relationship. Single-subject researchers intensively study individuals’ actions under two or more experimentally controlled conditions; usually behavior, or the product of behavior, is the dependent variable, and presence or absence of an experimentally controlled condition is the independent variable. To judge whether a relationship between the independent and dependent variables exists, the investigator inspects the data visually. These characteristics are shared by the various designs typically discussed in texts on single-subject research methodology (e.g., Johnston & Pennypacker, 1993; Kazdin, 1982; Tawney & Gast, 1984).

Informant similarities, twin studies, and the assessment of externalizing behavior: A meta-analysis

The purpose of this study was to examine similarity within informant ratings of the externalizing behavior of monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs. To do this, we conducted a meta-analysis of correlations within ratings completed by mothers, fathers, teachers, and youth. We retrieved n=204 correlations for MZ twins and n=267 correlations for DZ twins from n=54 studies containing n=55 samples. Results indicated that all four informants were significant negative predictors of within-informant correlations in their ratings of MZ, but not DZ twins. In the case of longitudinal studies and as the age of MZ twins increased, similarity within ratings by mothers was significantly greater than similarity within ratings by fathers. Among participant characteristics, we found that (a) age was a significant negative predictor of similarity within ratings for MZ twins; (b) race was a significant predictor of similarity within ratings for both MZ and DZ twins, but in the opposite direction; and (c) DZ opposite sex twins were a significant negative predictor of within-rating similarity. Among study characteristics for MZ twins, participant group and longitudinal study were significant negative predictors of within-rating similarity, and for both MZ and DZ twin pairs, non-independence in the data was a significant negative predictor of within-rating similarity. For DZ twins, multiple informants were significant positive predictors of within-rating similarity, and in longitudinal studies with DZ twins, similarity within ratings by mothers was significantly greater than similarity within ratings by fathers, and similarity within ratings by fathers was significantly less than similarity within ratings by teachers and youth. For both MZ and DZ twins, the following study characteristics were significant positive predictors of similarity within ratings: study group, number of time points, and multiple constructs. All four informants appeared equally skilled at predicting within-informant correlations for MZ (but not DZ) twins, with participant characteristics having different predictive effects for MZ compared to DZ twins, and study characteristics having comparable predictive effects for both twin types. Overall, these findings suggest effective discrimination on the part of four informants who rated the externalizing behavior of MZ and DZ twins.