Preservice teacher candidates acquire and develop numerous competencies in their teaching programs, including how to teach writing. Effective writing instruction is critical across all ages and content areas, especially when working with students with and at risk of emotional and behavioral disorders, making it an important aspect of teacher…

Various stakeholders continue to have concerns regarding the school performance of students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). In an effort to improve student outcomes, schools may rely on improving student access to general education classrooms (e.g., inclusion). This trend occurs at a time when districts across the nation face…

An increasing number of preschool children exhibit challenging behavior in the classroom. Children enrolled in Head Start are particularly at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders due to numerous risk factors they face. Unfortunately, some preschool teachers are ill-equipped to manage the challenging behaviors that preschool children…

Alternative educational settings are serving students with emotional disabilities (ED) at an increasing rate; however, there a paucity of research examining the effectiveness of these programs. A review of the existing literature targeting students with problematic behaviors, supports the use of a positive, preventative, proactive, and systematic…

Fluency in math facts and procedures is critical for math achievement overall and often challenging for students with emotional and behavioral disorders to develop. This article describes how to implement two complementary and evidence-based practice strategies, incremental rehearsal and Cover-Copy-Compare, to build declarative and procedural…

As students with special needs become increasingly mainstreamed into music classes, there is a demand for strategies to help teachers meet these students' needs. The purpose of this review of literature was to review and synthesize the literature focused on teaching students with an emotional/behavioral disorder (EBD) in the music classroom and to…

Evidence-based practices (EBPs) are strategies shown through rigorous experimentation to be effective when implemented as designed by educators in the field. The purpose of this review is to (a) describe the state and quality of evidence-based reviews and meta-analyses of studies on classroom and behavior management interventions for students with…

We used real world data to summarize comorbidities and interventions among patients newly diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Data were derived from two claims-based US healthcare databases; Medicaid and Optum to construct a retrospective cohort of 36,000 patients. Attention-Deficit-Hyperactivity-Disorder (ADHD) was the most common…

This study evaluated the effects of a function-based self-advocacy (FBSA) intervention, which provided systematic and explicit instruction to three students with or at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders on how to self-advocate their needs in regard to behavioral support based on the function of their behavior. We used a single-case,…

Students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) generally have behavior support plans that are based on a functional behavioral assessment. This article provides educators practical guidelines for conducting a "multiple stimulus without replacement" (MSWO) preference assessment to rank order preferred activities that will align…

This "Equity by Design" brief summarizes the key features and considerations for planning, implementing, and evaluating social, emotional or behavioral screening within multitier systems of support (MTSS), to advance educational equity.

Children with emotional disturbance have historically poor outcomes, including separate school environments, exclusion from school due to disciplinary actions, high dropout rates, poor employment outcomes, and incarceration. Therefore, it is imperative that children displaying early warning signs for risk of emotional disturbance receive effective…

The use of photography representing human distress in higher education warrants moral attention, owing to the imperative that we avoid objectifying the vulnerable communities who are often represented in those images. Assuming the fundamental Kantian precept that we should always treat others as ends and never merely as means, I extend this…

This dissertation is comprised of five distinct chapters. The first chapter is an introduction to Direct Instruction reading interventions as well as an explanation of the challenges experienced by struggling readers identified with emotional disturbances. The next three chapters serve as standalone papers. Chapter 2 is a systematic literature…

Evidence-based programs (EBPs) delivered in elementary schools show great promise in reducing risk for emotional and behavioral disorders (EBDs). However, efforts to sustain EBPs in school face barriers. Improving EBP sustainment thus represents a priority, but little research exists to inform the development of sustainment strategies. To address…