Inside IES Research

As a federal agency committed to advancing knowledge and innovation, IES recognizes just how critical it is to invest in the next generation of researchers in the education sciences. Since NCSER was established in 2006, we have funded a total of 86 postdocs and 37 early career scholars through our training programs. These investigators have gone on to produce notable accomplishments, including now-seminal research articles and research projects funded through our main research competitions, all while pushing the field of special education in new and important ways. The time is right to expand this investment further to bring scholars into the NCSER community even earlier in their research careers.

This fall, NCSER is launching its first grant competition for doctoral students: the Special Education Dissertation Research Fellowship Program (ALN 84.324G). This competition will provide up to eight advanced doctoral students with a 1-year fellowship of up to $50,000 to support the completion of their dissertation research and to participate in IES-related training. The goal of the fellowship is to broaden opportunities for emerging researchers to engage with IES and to prepare them to conduct high-quality research focused on learners with or at risk for disabilities. By providing financial support and resources during the dissertation phase, we hope to empower these emerging researchers to tackle new and pressing challenges in the field of special education.

Our inaugural competition focuses on four areas that have, to date, been underrepresented in NCSER’s funding portfolio—education systems, postsecondary education, educational technologies, and low-incidence disabilities. Each of these areas holds immense potential for impact, and we are prioritizing them through our other funding avenues. Our FY25 Special Education Research Grants competition (ALN 84.324A) focuses explicitly on education systems.  To establish more robust programs of research in the areas of postsecondary education and educational technologies, we launched a Research and Development (R&D) Center on postsecondary education and the AI Institute for Exceptional Education, both in FY23. We continue to explore ways to spur additional research investments focused on low-incidence disabilities.  

By making a concerted effort across our training programs, research grants, and special initiatives, we aim to encourage the fields of early intervention and special education to explore areas where we believe there are opportunities for groundbreaking research. We also hope this new initiative will continue NCSER’s work to foster a vibrant community of scholars committed to leveraging rigorous research to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. We look forward to seeing the impactful research that emerges from this fellowship and to working with the talented individuals who receive these dissertation fellowships.

This blog was written by Nathan Jones, NCSER commissioner, and Courtney Pollack and Katie Taylor, NCSER program officers.

Calling all education leaders and educators who teach mathematics! We hope you are enjoying your well-earned summer break. We at the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) would like to share our heartfelt gratitude for your dedication and hard work serving our nation’s children. Teachers, we know what it takes to create engaging lesson plans that meet the needs of diverse learners, provide academic and emotional support to your students, and foster a sense of community and belonging in your classroom. Education leaders, we also know that you are working to prepare educators for this coming school year.

Since 2008, NCSER has funded a range of studies focused on improving mathematics instruction in areas such as understanding of whole numbers, fractions, word problem solving, and algebraic reasoning, which are the building blocks of success in secondary mathematics and beyond. Based on what we're finding through our funded projects, we would like to share some resources with you to support work to improve mathematics instruction and learning—especially for students with or at risk for disabilities that affect mathematics—in the 2024-25 school year.

WWC Mathematics Practice Guides

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guides are written specifically for educators and summarize interventions and instructional practices for which there is the strongest evidence for improving outcomes for learners. The following WWC Practice Guides can be useful to support educators in strengthening mathematics instruction:

• Teaching Math to Young Children
• Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics: Intervention in the Elementary Grades
• Improving Mathematical Problem Solving in Grades 4 to 8
• Teaching Strategies for Improving Algebra Knowledge in Middle and High School Students
• Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning

Evidence-Based Math Interventions

Below are five examples of NCSER-funded interventions that have demonstrated improved outcomes in mathematics for learners with or at risk for a disability that affects mathematics.

• Numbershire is a digital math game with an intensive focus on critical whole number concepts and skills for students in kindergarten through second grade. Published findings from an efficacy study indicate significant effects favoring the learners using Numbershire on proximal measures of whole-number concepts and skills.
• Whole Number Foundations Level K is a kindergarten math intervention that provides in-depth instruction on critical whole number concepts, including counting and cardinality, operations and algebraic thinking, and number operations in base 10. Published findings from a replication efficacy trial of the intervention, originally called ROOTS, showed that students who received ROOTS in a small group of 2 or 5 students outperformed students in the control group.
• Whole Number Foundations Level 1 is a first grade intervention aimed at developing understanding of whole numbers. Published findings from an efficacy trial of the intervention, initially called FUSION, showed a significant effect on improving student math performance. The strongest effects on student outcomes at a follow-up assessment the next school year were among smaller groups of students (2:1) compared to the slightly larger groups.
• Pirate Math Equation Quest is a third grade intervention tested using two version of the tutoring program—one using equations to solve word problems and one using word-problem instruction alone. Published findings showed that students in both intervention groups significantly outperformed students in the control group with large effect sizes. At follow up (grade 4), only students in the group focusing on using equations (pre-algebra reasoning) significantly outperformed the control group on a measure of word problem solving.
• Super Solvers is a fraction intervention for grades 4-5 delivered in small groups of students with or at risk for math learning disabilities. The intervention was tested with interleaved calculation instruction (learning two or more related concepts or skills, instead of focusing exclusively on one concept or skill) and blocked calculation instruction (learning one concept or skill at a time). Published findings showed that students in the intervention group significantly outperformed the control group. At follow up a year later, the two intervention groups still significantly outperformed the control group, but the group with interleaved calculation instruction made greater gains than the blocked calculations group.

IES Math Summit 2023

In 2023, IES held a Math Summit  focused on evidence-based instructional practices, including presentations by some of our NCSER grantees who have developed and tested interventions to improve outcomes for learners with or at risk for disabilities. Below, we share links to these recorded sessions to support your professional learning.

Strategies for Differentiating Instruction for Diverse Learners

• (Grades Pre-K-3) Strategies for Differentiating Instruction for Diverse Learners, Dr. Lynn Fuchs, Vanderbilt University
• (Grades PreK-3) Education Technology as a Tool for Effective Differentiation, Dr. Nancy Nelson, Boston University

High-Dose Tutoring and Other Academic Recovery Strategies

• (Grades PreK-3) Utilizing the Curriculum Research Framework to Develop, Test, and Explore the Impacts of Interventions, Dr. Ben Clarke, University of Oregon
• (Grades PreK-3) Making Mathematics Interventions Work for Struggling Learners: 2021 What Works Clearinghouse Practice Guide, Dr. Lynn Fuchs, Vanderbilt University
• (Grades 4–8) A Fraction Sense Intervention Grounded in the Science of Learning, Dr. Nancy Jordan, University of Delaware

Language and Mathematics, Including Support for English Learners

• (Grades 4-8) Math Supports for Students with Reading Difficulties, Dr. Steve Ritter, Carnegie Learning

Increasing Opportunities to Learn and Raising Expectations for All

• (Grades 9-12) Seeing Growth in Algebra, Dr. Anne Foegen, University of Minnesota

Thank you for your dedication and commitment to our nation’s learners. We hope these resources will energize you for the exciting challenges that lie ahead.

This blog was produced by Sarah Brasiel (Sarah.Brasiel@ed.gov), a program officer for the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics portfolio in the National Center for Special Education Research.

In honor of Developmental Disabilities Month, NCSER would like to highlight research that supports young children with complex communication needs. Many children with disabilities, including those with autism and other developmental disabilities, may be described as having complex communication needs because they are unable to use speech to meet their needs in daily interactions. Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems provide such individuals a way to communicate that does not require vocal speech. Examples include low-tech systems like manual signs or picture cards and high-tech systems like electronic speech generating devices. For non-speaking children, access to AAC is critical for expressing their needs and wants, developing relationships, and participating in academic instruction. In school settings, paraeducators work frequently with students to support their communication needs.

With a NCSER-funded grant, Dr. Sarah Douglas (Michigan State University) has been developing and piloting an online training program, the POWR System, for paraeducators and their supervising teachers to improve communication skills of children with complex communication needs. We recently caught up with Dr. Douglas to learn more about the POWR System, what led her to conduct this research, and future directions.

What inspired you to conduct this research?

My exposure to children who use AAC began when I was a child myself. In elementary school, a new school was built in my neighborhood. Unlike other schools during the late 80s and early 90s, this school had special education rooms at the center of the school. Each time I went to various activities around school, the children were visible. The teacher in the classroom for children with extensive support needs, Mrs. Smith, was an advocate for inclusion and socialization for her students so each of the children spent time in general education classrooms. She began inviting general education students to spend recess in her classroom playing games and cooking with students. I took her up on this offer and got to interact with them while they used their AAC. I learned that communication could come in many forms—not just through speech. These early experiences led me to become a special education teacher supporting children with complex communication needs. In that class I worked with a lot of paraeducators. When I pursued my PhD, I focused on paraeducators and AAC. My dissertation topic laid the foundation for this NCSER grant project. During my dissertation I implemented an intervention to teach paraeducators how to best support children who use AAC. So, I guess you could say this has been something I’ve been working on for decades. 😊

What do the results from your research say about communication outcomes for young children with complex communication needs? What are the outcomes for educators that support student communication?

We’ve learned so much from this work. Findings from our study indicate that, for children who use AAC, the kinds of support and communication opportunities that paraprofessionals provide really matter. Providing meaningful, motivating opportunities to communicate is critical for young children who use AAC. One of our studies highlighted that young children who use AAC are most likely to respond after being provided with a choice or a question. These results suggest that certain types of supports make it more clear to young children that a response from them is expected. We also learned that waiting for them to communicate is critical. Generally, 5-7 seconds is sufficient wait time, but for children who have motor challenges more time is likely necessary. Also, paraeducators modeling the use of an AAC device can be really supportive, as our research found that children were more likely to communicate after a model of AAC by paraeducators. We all need models when we are learning new skills and children who use AAC are no different. We also learned that most paraeducators we worked with were very responsive to child communication, so teachers should continue to support and encourage that. Teachers can provide great supervision and support to paraeducators as they implement AAC strategies.

Based on these results, what are the implications for practice and policy?

Districts could do more to support teachers in knowing how to oversee and provide feedback to paraeducators. Not all teachers were comfortable with this role at first. We also feel strongly that, based on this work, more team members should be involved in interventions focused on AAC strategies. Perhaps the teacher and paraeducator are the main implementers, but speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and district level personnel have important roles in supporting this work and should also be involved in understanding these interventions and guiding implementation.

What are the next steps in your research on AAC for children with developmental disabilities?

We continue to do a lot of work to know how to best support child communication through communication partners such as siblings, parents, SLPs, teachers, and paraeducators. We recently obtained a new grant from IES to develop a professional development and training intervention for school-based SLPs to support family member implementation of communication strategies with children who use AAC. We are really excited about this project. It is only the first year, but we already have most of the intervention developed and are conducting focus groups with SLPs and family members to get feedback and make revisions.

How can educators find more information about the POWR system and implementing augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems in their classrooms?

The intervention is available and can be accessed by reaching out to me at sdouglas@msu.edu.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

I am just so grateful for the early experiences I had that led me to this important work and excited to support all the children, families, and educational teams.

A special thanks to Dr. Douglas and the POWR research team for all their hard work supporting communication for students using AAC. We look forward to seeing the impact your current project will have on the field!

This blog was written by Shanna Bodenhamer, virtual student federal service intern at NCSER and doctoral candidate at Texas A&M University. Emily Weaver, NCSER PO, monitors a portfolio of grants that covers both paraeducators and students with autism.

Positive career and technical education (CTE) experiences have the potential to lead to long-term success for students with disabilities. Yet the pathways into this field for teachers are highly variable. In honor of CTE Awareness Month, we would like to share an interview with NCSER-funded principal investigators Dan Goldhaber (left below) and Roddy Theobald (right below), who have been investigating the relationship between preparation pathways for CTE teachers and student outcomes. In the interview below, Drs. Goldhaber and Theobald share their findings and how their research can influence CTE teacher licensure. 

What led to your interest in studying CTE for students with disabilities?

A growing body of research—including prior work we’ve done with a NCSER grant on predictors of postsecondary outcomes for students with disabilities—has found that participation in a concentration of CTE courses in high school is a strong predictor of improved postsecondary outcomes for students with disabilities. Moreover, in another recent NCSER-funded project, we found that pre-service preparation of special education teachers can be a significant predictor of outcomes for students with disabilities in their classrooms. Our current project lies directly at the intersection of these two prior projects and asks the following question: Given the importance of both CTE courses and special education teachers for predicting outcomes for students with disabilities, what role do CTE teachers play in shaping these outcomes, and what types of CTE teacher preparation are most predictive of improved outcomes for these students? This question is important in Washington state because individuals with prior employment experience can become a CTE teacher through a "business and industry" (B&I) pathway that does not require as much formal teacher preparation as traditional licensure pathways. Likewise, this question is important nationally because over half of states offer a similar CTE-specific path to teacher licensure that relies on prior work experience as a licensure requirement.

Your research team published a report last year from your current research project with some surprising results related to the teacher preparation pathway and outcomes for students. Can you tell us about those findings?

In the first paper from this project, now published in Teacher Education and Special Education, we connected observable characteristics of CTE teachers in Washington to non-test outcomes (including absences, disciplinary incidents, grade point average, grade progression, and on-time graduation) of students with and without disabilities in their classrooms. The most surprising findin­g was that students with disabilities participating in CTE tended to have better non-test outcomes when they were assigned to a CTE teacher from the B&I pathway compared those assigned to a traditionally prepared CTE teacher.

What do you think may be the underlying reason for this finding?

We discussed several hypotheses for this result in the paper, including the possibility that the content knowledge and experience of B&I pathway teachers may matter more than traditional preparation for students with disabilities. This conclusion, however, comes with two caveats. First, preliminary results from the second paper (presented at the 2023 APPAM Fall Conference) suggest that these relationships do not translate to improved college enrollment or employment outcomes for these students. Second, we cannot disentangle the effects of B&I teachers' prior employment experiences from "selection effects" of who chooses to enter through this pathway.

In what ways can this research influence CTE policy and practice?

We have described teacher licensure as the "Wild West" of education policy because 50 different states are responsible for developing state teacher licensing systems. CTE teacher licensure is like the "Wild West of the Wild West" in that over half of states offer a CTE-specific pathway to licensure, which relies on prior industry experience as a requirement for licensure, each with different requirements and regulations. As states continue to navigate challenges with staffing CTE classrooms with qualified teachers, it is important to understand the implications of the unique CTE-specific pathways for student outcomes, particularly for students with disabilities. This project is an early effort to provide this evidence to inform CTE licensure policy. 

How do you plan to continue this line of research?

The next steps of this project leverage data provided through the Washington state’s P-20 longitudinal data system maintained by the Washington Education Research and Data Center (ERDC). ERDC has connected high school students' CTE experiences (including their teacher) to college and employment records. This allows us to consider the implications of CTE teacher characteristics for students' postsecondary outcomes. Moreover, due to the question about the prior employment experiences of CTE teachers, ERDC has agreed to link records on CTE teachers’ prior employment so we can disentangle the importance of different pre-teaching employment experiences of CTE teachers. 

Is there anything else you would like to add? 

We are grateful to NCSER for their support of this project and the two prior projects that motivated it!

Dr. Dan Goldhaber is the director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and the director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington.

Dr. Roddy Theobald is the deputy director of CALDER and a managing researcher at AIR. Thank you, Dr. Dan Goldhaber and Dr. Roddy Theobald, for sharing your experiences and findings about CTE!

This blog was authored by Skyler Fesagaiga, a Virtual Student Federal Service intern for NCSER and graduate student at the University of California, San Diego. Akilah Nelson, NCSER program officer, manages grants funded under the Career and Technical Education for Students with Disabilities special topic.

It is undeniable that artificial intelligence (AI) is, sooner rather than later, going to impact the work of teaching and learning in special education. Given formal adoption of AI technologies by schools and districts and informal uses of ChatGPT and similar platforms by educators and students, the field of special education research needs to take seriously how advancements in AI can complement and potentially improve our work. But there are also ways that these advancements can go astray. With these technologies advancing so quickly, and with AI models being trained on populations that may not include individuals with disabilities, there is a real risk that AI will fail to improve—or worse, harm—learning experiences for students with disabilities. Therefore, there is a pressing need to ensure that voices from within the special education community are included in the development of these new technologies.

At NCSER, we are committed to investing in research on AI technologies in a way that privileges the expertise of the special education community, including researchers, educators, and students with disabilities and their families. Below, we highlight two NCSER-funded projects that demonstrate this commitment.

Using AI to support speech-language pathologists

In 2023, NCSER partnered with the National Science foundation to fund AI4ExceptionalEd, a new AI Institute that focuses on transforming education for children with speech and language disorders. Currently, there is a drastic shortage of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to identify and instruct students with speech and language needs. AI4ExceptionalEd brings together researchers from multiple disciplines including special education, communication disorders, learning sciences, linguistics, computer science, and AI from nine different universities across the United States to tackle pressing educational issues around the identification of students and the creation of specially designed, individualized instruction for students with speech and language disorders.

By bringing together AI researchers and education researchers, this interdisciplinary research partnership is setting the foundation for cutting-edge AI technologies to be created that solve real-world problems in our schools. A recent example of this is in the creation of flash cards for targeted intervention. It is common practice for an SLP to use flash cards that depict a noun or a verb in their interventions, but finding or creating the exact set of flash cards to target a specific learning objective for each child is very time consuming. Here is where AI comes into play. The Institute’s team of researchers is leveraging the power of AI to help SLPs identify optimal sets of flash cards to target the learning objectives of each learner while also creating the flash cards in real time. To do this effectively, the AI researchers are working hand-in-hand with speech and language researchers and SLPs in the iterative development process, ensuring that the final product is aligned with sound educational practices. This one AI solution can help SLPs optimize their practice and reduce time wasted in creating materials.

Adapting a popular math curriculum to support students with reading disabilities

Another example of how partnerships can strengthen cutting-edge research using AI to improve outcomes for students with disabilities is a 2021 grant to CAST to partner with Carnegie Learning to improve their widely used digital math curriculum, MATHia. The goal of this project is to develop and evaluate reading supports that can be embedded into the adaptive program to improve the math performance, particularly with word problems, of students with reading disabilities. CAST is known for its research and development in the area of universal design for learning (UDL) and technology supports for students with disabilities. Carnegie Learning is well known for their suite of curriculum products that apply cognitive science to instruction and learning. The researchers in this partnership also rely on a diverse team of special education researchers who have expertise in math and reading disabilities and an educator advisory council of teachers, special educators, and math/reading specialists.

It has taken this kind of partnership—and the inclusion of relevant stakeholders and experts—to conduct complex research applying generative AI (ChatGPT) and humans to revise word problems within MATHia to decrease reading challenges and support students in understanding the semantic and conceptual structure of a word problem. Rapid randomized control trials are being used to test these revised versions with over 116,000 students participating in the study. In 2022-2023 the research team demonstrated that humans can successfully revise word problems in ways that lead to improvements in student performance, including students with disabilities. The challenge is in trying to train generative AI to reproduce the kinds of revisions humans make. While generative AI has so far been unevenly successful in making revisions that similarly lead to improvements in student outcomes, the researchers are not ruling out the use of generative AI in revising word problems in MATHia.

The research team is now working with their expert consultants on a systematic reading and problem-solving approach as an alternative to revising word problems. Instead of text simplification, they will be testing the effect of adding instructional support within MATHia for some word problems.

The promise of AI

AI technologies may provide an opportunity to optimize education for all learners. With educators spending large amounts of their day planning and doing paperwork, AI technologies can be leveraged to drastically decrease the amount of time teachers need to spend on this administrative work, allowing more time for them to do what only they can—teach children. Developers and data scientists are invariably going to continue developing AI technologies, many with a specific focus on solutions to support students with disabilities. We would like to encourage special education researchers to exert their expertise in this development work, to partner with developers and interdisciplinary teams to apply AI to create innovative and novel solutions to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. For AI to lead to lasting advances in education spaces, it will be imperative that this development is inclusive of the special education field.

This blog was written by NCSER Commissioner, Nate Jones (Nathan.Jones@ed.gov) and NCSER program officers Britta Bresina (Britta.Bresina@ed.gov) and Sarah Brasiel (Sarah.Brasiel@ed.gov).