Special educators serve a diverse population of students with unique strengths and needs, and adaptive interventions that account for individual differences before and during the intervention are an important tool to moving the field toward more individualized practices. The purpose of this article is to detail the conceptualization and…

The brain undergoes profound development across childhood and adolescence, including continuous changes in brain morphology, connectivity, and functioning that are, in part, dependent on one's experiences. These neurobiological changes are accompanied by significant changes in children's and adolescents' cognitive learning. By drawing from studies…

Interventions often require multiple decisions to improve outcomes for every student. Whether the decision to implement a practice, tailor an existing protocol, or change approaches, these decisions should be based on individual variables and outcomes via a sequence of treatment. To develop adaptive interventions that have sufficient evidence to…

How well doctoral students in special education are prepared to evaluate research as evidence-based practice (EBP) is likely to impact their careers, as well as the teachers they will train. In developing a method for evaluating the readiness of small cohort groups of doctoral students to apply a research-based model of EBP, an instrument and…

This case study describes how our research team conducted an individual differences research project in a middle school science classroom. The main goal of our work was to investigate whether individual differences in cognitive abilities predict individual differences in scientific reasoning in middle school students. In order to address our…

One obstacle to understanding abstract concepts such as the "control of variables" strategy (CVS) is the tendency for learners to focus on surface rather than deep features in instructional materials. However, in tasks such as learning CVS, these same surface features may also support understanding, provided learners realize the…