Program Announcement: Postdoctoral Research Training Program in Special Education CFDA 84.324B

Program Officer:
Dr. Celia Rosenquist
(202) 219-2024
Celia.Rosenquist@ed.gov

Purpose

The Institute has established the Special Education Postdoctoral Research Training Program to increase the supply of scientists and researchers in education who are prepared to conduct rigorous evaluation studies, develop and evaluate new products and approaches that are grounded in a science of learning, design and validate tests and measures for students in special education, and contribute to the advancement of knowledge and theory in special education. The specific intent of this program is to prepare researchers who are able to conduct the type of research that the Institute funds, prepare competitive proposals that address relevant education topics, and meet the methodological requirements specified for the Institute's research grant competitions.

The Institute's research grant competitions are designed to produce research that contributes to the solution of education problems identified by education decision-makers and practitioners. These research grant programs target key student outcomes and the types of research questions posed by education decision-makers and practitioners. In early childhood, the primary outcomes of interest are school readiness and developmental outcomes for infants and toddlers with disabilities. From kindergarten through Grade 12, the core academic outcomes of reading, writing, mathematics, and science are the central outcomes of interest, as well as social and behavioral skills that support academic learning in school, and successful transitions to employment, independent living, and postsecondary education.

Background

Grounding special education policy and practice in the United States on evidence will require transformation of both the research and practice fields. Students with disabilities continue to fare much worse than their peers without disabilities, achieving lower rates of success on both in-school (e.g., achievement) and post-school outcomes (e.g., employment) (e.g., Wagner, Newman, Cameto, & Levine, 2005; Conderman & Katsiyannis, 2002). To improve outcomes for students with disabilities, practitioners will have to turn routinely to education research when making important decisions, and education researchers will have to produce research that is relevant to those decisions. To achieve this ambitious agenda, there is a need for a cadre of well-trained scientists capable of conducting high quality research in special education that is relevant to practitioners and policymakers.

Many of the questions raised by practitioners and policymakers require answers to questions of what works in special education for whom and under what circumstances. These are causal questions that are best answered by research using cluster randomized controlled designs or well-designed quasi-experimental designs. However, the special education research community has not employed group causal designs regularly or systematically to address causal research questions (Seethaler & Fuchs, 2005). Special education also provides unique challenges to researchers, because employing a randomized group design for certain disabilities (e.g., low-incidence disabilities) can pose enormous challenges for recruiting participants, selecting participants, and implementing such a design. Through its research grant programs, the Institute encourages research that addresses questions of what works, for whom, and under what circumstances by inviting applicants to submit proposals to carry out such projects under the Efficacy and Replication goal and the Scale-Up Evaluations goal in the Institute's research funding announcements.

Another category of questions raised by the practice community focuses on assessment; the standards and accountability movement has generated a ballooning demand for assessment research in special education. There is a particular need for researchers who can address questions of how assessments for accountability can best be designed and used to capture and represent proficiency and growth for children with disabilities. Across its research grant programs, the Institute encourages the development and validation of assessments under the Measurement and Assessment goal in the Institute's research funding announcements. Individuals with skills in psychometrics are needed throughout the education sector, from federal statistics agencies to state education agencies, from test developers to local school districts.

Yet another category of problems raised by practitioners and policy makers is the need for a new generation of teaching materials and curricula that take advantage of expanding knowledge of how people learn, and that leverage new delivery mechanisms such as the Internet (National Research Council, 2000). The complexity of student characteristics within and across disability categories, and the diversity of placement settings and services require the development of interventions targeting students across the full spectrum of disability categories (Odom, Brantlinger, Gersten, Horner, Thompson, and Harris, 2005). Across its research grant programs, the Institute supports projects to develop new education interventions (e.g., curricula, instructional approaches, professional development training) under the Development and Innovation goal in the Institute's research grant funding announcements. The conceptualization, development, implementation, and evaluation of new teaching methods will require scientists who are well trained in cognition, learning, motivation, classroom instruction, and teacher training, and who are prepared to conduct research — both development and evaluation studies — in complex, real-world education settings.

The needs of education policy and practice are served not only by research that directly addresses questions of what works but also by research that raises questions and generates hypotheses that can eventually lead to new applications or refinements of existing approaches (National Research Council, 2002). Hypothesis-generating research may rely on complex statistical methods that can tease apart potential causal influences in large datasets and can take advantage of many of the district or state longitudinal datasets that have been or are being developed. Hypothesis-generating research may also involve detailed observations, for example, of classroom instruction along with sophisticated quantitative analyses to determine the associations between specific instructional practices and child outcomes. Hypothesis-generating research may also utilize sophisticated meta-analyses to explore the characteristics of education practices or programs that are associated with the most positive outcomes, as well as identify potential moderators or mediators of those relationships. Across our research grant programs, these types of research efforts are supported under the Exploration goal in the Institute's research grant funding announcements.

Statistical training is also needed in the design and analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies, single case designs, as well as survey and observational data. Although there are many doctoral training programs that focus on statistics, the application of this expertise to problems in special education requires that students be grounded in special education content. That, in turn, requires a concentration of statistically sophisticated students and faculty whose research projects are focused on special education topics, including the design and analysis of single-case research methods.

References

Conderman, G., & Katsiyannis, A. (2002). Instructional issues and practices in secondary special education. Remedial and Special Education, 23, 169–179.

National Research Council. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school. Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning. J. Bransford, A. Brown, and R. Cocking (Eds.) Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice. S. Donovan, J. Bransford, and J. Pellegrino (Eds.). Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences in Education. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

National Research Council (2002). Scientific research in education. Committee on Scientific Principles for Education Research. R.J. Shavelson and L. Towne (Eds.). Center for Education. Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

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.

Seethaler, P. S., & Fuchs, L. S. (2005) A drop in the bucket: Randomized controlled trials testing reading and math interventions. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 20(2), 98–102.

Wagner, M., Newman, L., Cameto, R., & Levine, P. (2005). A Report of Findings from the National Longitudinal Transition Study (NLTS) and the National LongitudinalTransition Study-2 (NLTS2). Menlo Park, CA: SRI International.