Over 90% of students with complex support needs are taught in self-contained (segregated) special education classrooms for most of their school day, despite accumulating evidence these classrooms are not associated with positive student outcomes. Yet placement in these segregated classrooms persists, in part because of assumptions about the degree…

Social Stories™ are a story-based intervention commonly used to teach students with disabilities how to behave in new routines or changing environments, academic skills, and social interactions including tacting others' emotions. According to the National Standards Project, story-based interventions are considered an established treatment.…

Students with emotional-behavioral disorders (EBDs) often learn in alternative classroom settings to provide more intensive instruction that meets their educational needs. Although research has demonstrated promise for several behavior intervention practices in general education settings, the generalizability of these practices to more restricted…

Secondary public education for students with severe disabilities offers some of the last opportunities for improved social/behavioral skills, activities of daily living, and cognitive/academic instruction. The problem is that thorough descriptions of self-contained classroom ecology and teachers' use of evidence-based strategies are limited.…

Adopting an "act-in-context" approach is helpful to researchers investigating situational variability in children's active engagement in preschool classrooms. Aligned with this approach, we propose an empirical pathway and a conceptual model to support examinations of contextual factors hypothesized to impact active engagement as well as…

Students with complex support needs frequently experience restrictive educational placements such as self-contained and separate school classrooms. Given the need to support students with complex support needs to experience positive outcomes and make progress in the general education curriculum, there is a need to investigate the characteristics…

Students with complex support needs frequently experience restrictive educational placements such as self-contained and separate school classrooms. Given the need to support students with complex support needs to experience positive outcomes and make progress in the general education curriculum, there is a need to investigate the characteristics…

This study sought to explore and describe the extent to which research based practices were employed for cultivating an environment that fostered reading motivation in self-contained classrooms for students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). To accomplish this, a descriptive multiple case study design was employed in which data were…

This study investigated practices in self-contained high school classrooms serving students with significant cognitive disability (SCD). Nineteen students and nine teachers across five high schools participated. A time-sampling method was used to describe the ecological, teacher, and student behaviors of these classrooms. Field notes were…