Purpose: Following recent federal legislation and related policy changes, co-teaching evolved rapidly as a strategy to provide students with disabilities access to the same curriculum as students without disabilities while receiving instruction in the least restrictive environment. It is unclear if co-teaching is an effective instructional…

This study examined parental involvement as a mediator of the academic performance of middle school students with special needs. The study built on the different types of parental involvement theorized by Epstein and colleagues (2002) and studied empirically by Fan and Chen (2001). Using a specially developed questionnaire, a sample of 82 parents…

Mandates such as No Child Left Behind (2001) and Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (2004) shifted the emphasis of instruction to include skills that access the general curriculum for students with moderate to severe intellectual disability. The purpose of this study was to describe changes in literacy instruction of teachers…

A major goal of special education services is to prepare graduates for productive and rewarding lives as adults in the community. Follow-up studies, however, consistently have indicated very poor post-school outcomes for special education graduates. While there has been a wealth of research related to the effectiveness of services in inclusive…

A significant proportion of Canada's school-age population requires special educational provisions. Statistics Canada reports that 4.6% of 5- to 14-year-olds had some kind of disability in 2006. As well, recent data from the British Columbia and Ontario ministries of education indicate that students with designated special educational needs…

Bullying and victimisation remains a pervasive problem within the nation's schools. International research has indicated that students who are enrolled in special education curricula are victimised and perpetrate more bullying than their general education peers. Few empirical studies have examined bullying and victimisation rates among American…

This study was conducted with school personnel in Yun-Lin County, a rural school district of Taiwan, to identify and compare the attitudes of school administrators, regular education teachers, and special education teachers toward the inclusion of students with disabilities in the regular classroom and to identify the extent to which inclusion is…

Universal design for transition (UDT) refers to an approach to instructional planning, delivery, and assessment that bridges the gap between teaching academic and functional/transition goals. It builds upon the principals of universal design for learning (UDL) assuring that instructional practices are designed to meet the needs of diverse learners…

Research Findings: Quality of care for preschool children in inclusive and noninclusive classrooms was examined in two studies. In Study 1, comparisons across a large sample of classrooms (N = 1, 313) showed that inclusive classrooms were higher than noninclusive classrooms in global quality as well as on two dimensions of quality…

Little attention has been dedicated to monitoring the educational progress of students with EBD receiving services in restrictive settings, using empirically validated tools and procedures. This study compared the progress of students with EBD receiving special education services in either a self-contained school or self-contained classrooms to…