1. C H A R A C T E R I S T I C S O F S T U D E N T S W I T H
M I L D / M O D E R A T E I N T E R V E N T I O N N E E D S
S P E D 4 / 5 3 0 5 0
I N S T R U C T O R : B R I A N F R I E D T
Week twelve:
Implications for teaching and learning

2. Where we’re going
 This week:
 Evidence-based practices in general
 What they are
 What they mean
 Why we should seriously consider their use
 Evidence-based practices specific to our areas of disability
 Do they exist?
 What are they?
 In the very near future:
 Interview presentation is due on December 4!

3. Evidence-based practice
 A treatment or intervention that:
 has a clear operational definition,
 targets a socially valid student outcome or behavior,
 is shown to positively affect target outcome by a sufficient
number of research studies that show experimental control.
 experimental, quasi-experimental, single subject research
 Essentially, EBPs are treatments or interventions
that good research suggests will work to affect
positive change in students in classroom settings.

4. Will EBPs always work?
 No.
 However, as a field, we probably ought to:
 Use the treatment most likely to work first.
 If that fails, move to the next most likely treatment.
 And so on...

5. Do EBPs restrict teacher creativity?
 Not really.
 Good instruction still relies heavily on the specialized
knowledge of a teacher.
 You have to know your students.
 You have to know the characteristics of student disabilities.
 You have to be able to get an EBP to work for you.
 That said:
 There are critical components to all treatments, things that
can’t be changed without throwing everything off.
 Implementing EBPs with fidelity is important.

6. Why should we use EBPs?
 We want to secure positive outcomes for our
students.
 Academic
 Social
 Adaptive
 Behavioral
 EBPs have the support of research.
 If we use them well, they can secure the outcomes that we want
for our students. That’s what they are supposed to do.
 And. There’s a legislative imperative to do so.

7. Why shouldn’t we use EBPs?
 Maybe things don’t generalize to other settings.
Maybe we can’t know stuff. Maybe there is no such
thing as an evidence-based practice.
 For a much more refined statement of this position, see:
 Gallagher, D.J. (1998). The scientific knowledge base of special
education: Do we know what we think we know? Exceptional
Children, 24, 304-314.

8. Current state of EBPs
 Not used to as much as they could be in the field, for
a variety of reasons
 Unclear what practices are evidence-based
 No clear warehouse for EBPs; teachers don’t generally go into
the research to find them on their own
 Teachers generally rely on personal or informal sources of
information to inform their practice
 It’s harder to implement an EBP with fidelity than it is to do
something else

9. Readings...
Cook, B.G., Landrum, T.J., Tankersley, M., &
Kauffman, J.M. (2003). Bringing research to bear on practice:
effecting evidence-based instruction for students with
emotional or behavioral disorders. Education and Treatment
of Children, 26, 345-361.
Odom, S.L., Brantlinger, E., Gersten, R., Horner, R.H.,
Thompson, B., & Harris, K.R. (2005). Research in special
education: Scientific methods and evidence-based practices.
Exceptional Children, 71, 137-148.

10. More readings...
 Four articles:
 Lloyd, Kavale, and Forness (1999)
 Broad overview of several meta-analyses
 Landrum, Tankersley, and Kauffman (2003)
 What works for students with EBD?
 Vaughn and Linan-Thompson (2003)
 What works for students with SLD?
 Browder et al. (2006)
 Reading instruction for students with CD

11. There is a lot of reading this week
 Consider these ideas as you read:
 How do the recommendations in this literature align with what
you already know about the characteristics of each disability
category?
 How trustworthy, useable, and accessible is this information?
Have the researchers presented strategies that you could use in
an instructional setting?
 Is this kind of thing important? As special educators, should
we be following the broad guidelines laid out here?

12. Enjoy the reading
 Keep on trucking on your interview projects.