IES Blog

Institute of Education Sciences

National Special Education Day: Looking Back to Move Forward

Two students wearing masks and writing in notebooks in a classroom.

Today is National Special Education Day and marks nearly 50 years since the signing of the Individuals with Disabilities Act. Recognizing the tremendous hardship that the entire special education community has experienced during the pandemic, the staff at NCSER are celebrating the educators and students who strive for an accessible, high-quality system of special education.

The difficulty of the last two years cannot be understated. They have been filled with anxiety, isolation, and grief for so many. Few communities have been as directly impacted by school closures, reduced socialization, and the many limitations of the pandemic as students with disabilities. Many lost access to the schools and staff they rely upon, hindering identification efforts and preventing service delivery. Students with disabilities experienced more absenteeism and struggled more academically than their peers. And while there are few quantitative estimates of the impacts of remote learning on students with disabilities, the previous achievement gap students with disabilities experienced will likely grow worse as a result of lost instruction and services.

Despite these challenges, schools, parents, service providers, and students across the country have fought to adapt swiftly, exploring new technologies and other innovations. Several states have taken legislative action to provide additional support for students with disabilities, and greater attention has been placed on the obstacles that students with disabilities have faced before and during the pandemic, such as under-identification, discipline disparities, and inadequate support services. While the expected impacts on student achievement are deeply concerning, we are hopeful that our experiences during this time will bring into focus the importance of serving students with disabilities and spur on innovation towards that end. At NCSER, we remain committed to research that leads to actionable evidence to support the practitioner community as it adapts to and strives for a new, better normal.

Since NCSER was established in 2004, our mission has been to provide timely, relevant evidence to inform practice and improve educational outcomes for students with disabilities. We funded over 500 grants, allocating nearly $1 billion to support quality research on topics imperative to improving the educational opportunities for students with disabilities from birth through the transition to postsecondary education and career. NCSER funding has supported the development and testing of important interventions in a variety of domains. For example, Kids in Transition to School is an intensive school readiness intervention that has demonstrated positive impacts in literacy, self-regulation, and parent involvement for young children with co-occurring developmental disabilities and behavior problems. Numerous NCSER-funded interventions have demonstrated similarly positive outcomes in domains such as student behavior (CW-Fit), math achievement (Numbershire), and literacy (Early Literacy Skills Builder).

In addition to interventions, NCSER funding has supported the development and validation of assessments, including the Transition Assessment and Goal Generator for measuring non-academic skills associated with postsecondary education and employment and the Individual Growth and Development Indicators for screening and progress monitoring in infants and toddlers across various developmental domains. NCSER-funded research has also advanced our understanding of factors that support positive student outcomes, with a number of studies analyzing existing data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 to identify factors associated with positive transition outcomes for students with disabilities. This funding has also supported large-scale research and leadership initiatives, including Research Networks and Research and Development Centers designed to tackle complex issues requiring more in-depth study. For example, the Multi-Tiered Systems of Support Network is studying the integration of academic and behavioral support systems in elementary schools using diverse methods. Others include the Center for Improving the Learning of Fractions, National Center on Assessment and Accountability for Special Education, and Center for Literacy and Deafness.

These projects have made significant contributions to the field of special education research, yet they often reflect the iterative nature of education research. It can take a long time to produce programs and interventions supported by quality research. As the pandemic continues to impact students with disabilities across the country, it is clear that we must adapt, harnessing new innovations to build greater resilience into our system of public education. NCSER will use American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds to provide more timely and relevant evidence for supporting students with disabilities through the Research to Accelerate Pandemic Recovery (324X) grant program, which requires researchers to address a pandemic-related problem, issue, or intervention important to education agencies and has the potential to significantly and rapidly improve outcomes for students with or at risk for disabilities. We look forward to announcing the awards in the future and sharing the insights they will provide as the field moves forward.

Most recently, IES has developed a partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund transformative research in artificial intelligence to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. Using ARP funds, NCSER will support a grant competition held by NSF’s National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes. Competed under Theme 6, Track B: AI-Augmented Learning for Individuals with Disabilities, applicants must focus on deploying artificial intelligence to meet the needs of learners with or at risk for disabilities and address the pandemic’s negative impacts on these students. Innovative research like this will be vital to meeting the emergent needs of pandemic recovery, and IES is excited to build on this collaboration with NSF.

For nearly 18 years, we have sought to advance research and practice to support students with disabilities. Though institutions, terminology, and best practices continue to evolve, one thing remains unchanged— good science can deliver transformative improvements in educating students with disabilities. We are hopeful that with greater knowledge and understanding of the changes that have occurred during the pandemic, our system of educating students with disabilities will be made more equitable for all seasons and more effective, even in the face of crisis. As we spend our second National Special Education Day amid a continuing pandemic, we hope you will join us in reflecting on how far the field of special education research has come, looking forward to new and innovative approaches to research, and, most of all, celebrating the unwavering courage and resilience of this community.

This blog was written and edited by Bennett Lunn (Bennett.Lunn@ed.gov), Truman-Albright Fellow for the National Center for Education Research and the National Center for Special Education Research, and Amy Sussman (Amy.Sussman@ed.gov), Program Officer for the National Center for Special Education Research.

World Braille Day: Research on Teaching Braille to Students with Visual Impairments

January 4 is World Braille Day, which aims to increase awareness of the importance of braille as a means of communication for those who are blind or with visual impairment. The date chosen honors the birthday of Louis Braille, who invented a reading and writing system – braille – consisting of raised dots that are read via touch. This system of reading and writing is an important component of education and literacy for many individuals. Recognizing this importance, Simon Fisher-Baum, Robert Englebretson, and Cay Holbrook were awarded a NCSER grant in 2019 to explore the knowledge, skills, and strategies teachers of students with visual impairments need to effectively teach braille reading and writing. We asked this team of researchers to answer a few questions about their work on teaching braille in recognition of World Braille Day.

What do we already know about the complexities surrounding learning braille for a person with visual impairment?

The ability to read and write braille is crucial for individuals who are blind, just as print literacy is crucial for individuals who are sighted. Braille literacy opens a host of opportunities for education, leisure, and employment. Learning to read and write braille depends on children having direct instruction from competent professionals who know braille and recognize its importance in facilitating literacy. Most children who learn braille do so under the instruction of a Teacher of Students with Visual Impairments (TVI) with support from their classroom teachers who generally are only familiar with print. One major challenge for children learning braille is having sufficient access to a TVI. A second challenge involves the differences between print and braille and the different perspectives required of a typically sighted TVI and the children with visual impairment. The sighted TVI has learned braille as a 'code' (and thinks about transliterating it to their much stronger knowledge of print) whereas children are learning braille as their primary system of reading and writing. It is this potential mismatch that we are focusing on for our project. We seek to understand the perceptual and cognitive underpinnings of braille as a writing system for its readers in contrast with the print-based 'code' perspective that TVIs often implicitly and unconsciously bring to their teaching.

Your project has the challenge of researching a low-incidence population. Describe how you are able to find your sample.

There are no current, reliable demographics of the number of individuals who read braille in the United States. But the fact remains that even in a large city like Houston, where two of the co-PIs are based, it would be a real challenge to find a sufficient number of braille readers to conduct studies with any degree of statistical power. Because of this, we recruit participants at summer conventions of blindness organizations where there are large numbers of braille readers present. At least we hope to do this again once people can gather safely. Meanwhile, we are developing experiments involving adult braille readers submitting braille writing samples online and, thanks to the support of the Braille Institute of America, we are analyzing spelling tests and writing samples from over 1000 braille-learning children from the U.S. and Canada who participated in a literacy-focused contest called the Braille Challenge. In addition, we have access to teachers of students with visual impairments who read and write braille through the Braille Institute and professional conferences as well as strong contacts of researchers involved in this grant.

Tell us a little more about the Braille Challenge.

The Braille Challenge is an annual contest for braille-reading children in grades 1-12 in the U.S. and Canada that celebrates braille literacy and the academic use of braille. Since 2003, the Braille Institute of America has sponsored this event. You can think of the Braille Challenge a bit like the Scripps National Spelling Bee for kids who read braille, with sub-contests in areas such as spelling, writing braille from dictation, reading comprehension, proofreading, and analyzing tactile charts and graphs. The written materials that students produce from these contests are a treasure trove of comparative data. They enable us to analyze the error patterns in the same words and sentences produced by a large number of students, track the development and error patterns in the same students over the years, and ultimately associate student outcomes with the specific attitudes, knowledge, and skills their TVIs (who attend the contest with their students) bring to the teaching of braille.

Your project is using some innovative data collection approaches, such as finger and eye tracking studies. What do you hope to learn from this part of your project that can be better understood by these data collection approaches? 

Eye tracking is, of course, central in the reading sciences for understanding key perceptual, cognitive, and linguistic processing aspects of reading standard print. There has been little work to address those same types of questions with braille readers using finger-tracking technology. Our finger-tracking experiments will help us compare the proficiency of adult braille readers with the ways in which braille is being taught. In addition, one area that has never been explored is the underpinnings of how TVIs read braille. Typically, sighted TVIs read braille by eye (not by touch), and we would like to understand how reading braille by eye is similar to or different from how these same individuals read print by eye, and in turn, how TVIs reading braille by sight is similar to and different from the typical way blind readers read braille by touch.

What impact do you hope your project will have on how TVIs are trained and how they teach braille to students?

We hope that by understanding how braille is conceptualized and read differently by TVIs, proficient braille-reading adults who are blind, and children learning to read and write braille, our project will ultimately lead to evidence-based interventions for both TVIs and learners. This may include improved curricula for university TVI personnel preparation programs and improved materials designed for children learning braille that leverage their unique perspectives as braille readers.

Tell us about your research team and the diversity of experiences among team members with braille.

Photo of Cay Holbrook, Simon Fischer-Baum, Robert Englebretson
Clockwise from top left: Cay Holbrook, Simon Fischer-Baum, Robert Englebretson

The three research team members complement each other in areas of expertise, as well as in experiences with braille. Robert Englebretson is currently chair of the Linguistics Department at Rice University. He teaches a course on braille from the perspective of cognitive science and linguistics research. He has been recognized internationally for his work updating and publishing the braille version of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which enables access to careers in the language sciences for those who are blind or visually impaired and has served as co-chair of the research committee of the Braille Authority of North America. He also brings to this project his perspective as a life-long braille reader and his lived experience of the importance of braille literacy.

Simon Fischer-Baum is an Associate Professor of Psychological Sciences at Rice University. He comes to this project as a cognitive scientist who focuses on understanding literacy, using a wide variety of methods, from the careful analyses of the errors people make when reading and writing to analysis of the patterns of brain activity generated when we read and the study of individuals who have lost the ability to read or write following stroke. He learned about braille as a part of this current collaboration and applies his skillset as a cognitive scientist of language to figuring out the mental representations and processes that underlie how braille is read and written.

Cay Holbrook is a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada. She learned braille during her undergraduate program as part of an initial teaching credential. She began working as a teacher of students with visual impairments in Rock Hill, South Carolina and has also worked directly with students in K-12 in parts of Georgia and Florida. Her commitment to direct, ongoing, and consistent instruction by qualified teachers has guided much of her work. Her research and scholarship have included the publication of more than 12 co-authored or co-edited textbooks as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She holds a PhD in special education from Florida State University. She has prepared teachers of students with visual impairments in Canada and the U.S. and was a member of the original advisory committee for the Braille Challenge.

What other research do you think is needed in the area of learning braille? What are your future plans to continue research in this area?

There is still much to be learned about how braille is read and written, and there are many lines of inquiry in braille literacy that would benefit greatly from a multidisciplinary approach to research like we are taking here. After we complete this project, our next goal would be to develop and test interventions that bring the perspectives of TVIs closer to the learning challenges their students are facing. But there is also the opportunity for new lines of research. One key question is how braille is learned by people who become blind later in life, including school-age children and older adults. There is already some evidence that these readers approach reading by touch differently than individuals who have only learned braille, but more research is needed to explore how those who become blind after learning to read print approach learning braille and what kinds of instructional strategies would best support their literacy acquisition. It is also worth exploring how different service delivery models – that is, what role the TVI plays in the student’s education plan – impact how the student learns to read and write. Finally, we know little about whether learning differences that lead to dyslexia and dysgraphia in the print reading population also occur in the braille reading population. To our knowledge, these kinds of developmental differences have never been explored within the population of braille reading children, but if they do occur, it seems like additional interventions would be needed with these students to help them acquire literacy.

 

Investing in Next Generation of Education Technologies to Personalize Learning and Inform Instructional Practice

The Institute of Education Sciences Small Business Innovation Research program (ED/IES SBIR) funds entrepreneurial developers to create the next generation of education technology for students, teachers, and administrators in general and special education. The program emphasizes an iterative research and development process and pilot studies to evaluate the feasibility, usability, and promise of new products to improve educational outcomes. The program also focuses on commercialization after development is complete, so that the products can reach schools and be sustained over time.

In recent years, millions of students in tens of thousands of schools around the country have used technologies developed through ED/IES SBIR. And in the past four months, about one million students and teachers used the technologies for remote teaching and learning, as many ED/IES SBIR-supported developers made their products available at no cost in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the closure of schools.

 

ED/IES SBIR Announces its 2020 Awards

This week, ED/IES SBIR announced the results of its 2020 award competition. Of the 22 new awards, 16 are for prototype development and 6 are for full-scale development. IES also announced two additional awards through a special topic solicitation in postsecondary education. Read about these awards here.

 

 

Each of the new awards supports a project to develop a product to personalize the student learning experience or generate information that educators can use to guide practice.

Most of the projects are developing a software component (for example, algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine Learning, or natural language processing) that continually adjusts the difficulty of content, provides prompts to support individual students if support is needed, or generates real-time actionable information for educators to track student progress and adjust instruction accordingly. Other projects are developing technologies to promote student learning through self-directed, hands-on, simulated, and immersive experiences. If the future of education includes a blend of in-class and remote learning due to public health crises, or for whatever reasons, technologies such as these will be ready to keep the learning going.

The projects address different ages of students and content areas.

In science, LightHaus is fully developing a virtual reality (VR) intervention for students to explore plant heredity; LightUp is fully developing an augmented reality (AR) app for students to perform hands-on physical science investigations with their own on-device camera; and Myriad Sensors is developing a prototype artificial intelligence formative assessment system that generates feedback in real time as students do hands-on laboratory experiments.

In math, Muzology is creating a prototype for students to create music videos to learn algebra, and Teachley is creating a prototype transmedia kit with videos, comics, and pictures to enhance teaching and learning of hard to learn concepts.

In engineering and computer science, Parametric Studios is fully developing an augmented reality puzzle game for early learners, and Liminal eSports, Makefully, and Beach Day Studios are creating prototype components that each provide feedback to students as they engage in activities to learn to code.

In English Language Arts, Analytic Measures and Hoogalit are each employing natural language processing to develop new prototypes to facilitate speech acquisition, and Learning Ovations is developing a prototype data engine to make recommendations for what individual children should read.

For English learners, KooApps is developing an artificial intelligence prototype to support vocabulary acquisition, and Kings Peak Technologies is employing machine learning to generate passages that blend English and Spanish words together to improve reading comprehension.

For early learners, Cognitive Toybox is fully developing an observation and game-based school readiness assessment.

For postsecondary students, Hats & Ladders is fully developing a social skills game to foster career readiness skills.

In special education, Attainment Company is developing a prototype to support student’s self-management, and Alchemie is developing a prototype of an augmented reality science experience for visually impaired students.

To support school administrators and teachers, LearnPlatform is fully developing a dashboard that generates reports with insights for teachers to implement education technology interventions, and Zuni Learning Tree, Teachley and LiveSchool are developing prototype dashboards to organize and present results on student progress and performance in real time.

 

Stay tuned for updates on Twitter and Facebook as IES continues to support innovative forms of technology.


Written by Edward Metz (Edward.Metz@ed.gov), Program Manager, ED/IES SBIR

Developing and Piloting the Special Education Research Accelerator

The traditional approach to research involves individual researchers or small teams independently conducting a large number of relatively small studies. Crowdsourcing research provides an alternative approach that combines resources across researchers to conduct studies that could not be done individually. As such, it has the power to address some challenges with the traditional research approach, including limited diversity of research participants as well as researchers, small sample sizes, and lack of resources. In 2019, the National Center for Special Education Research funded a grant to the University of Virginia to develop a platform for conducting crowdsourced research with students with or at risk for disabilities—the Special Education Research Accelerator (SERA).

Below, the Principal Investigators of this grant – Bryan Cook, Bill Therrien, and Vivian Wong – tell us more about the problems they intend to address through SERA, its potential, and the activities involved in its development and testing.

What’s the purpose of SERA?

SERA is a platform for conducting research in special education with large and representative study samples across multiple research sites and researchers. We are developing SERA to address some common concerns in education research, such as (a) studies with small, underpowered, and non-representative samples; (b) lack of resources for individual investigators to engage in the high-quality research that they have the skills to conduct; and (c) scarce replication studies. The issue of small, underpowered, and non-representative samples is especially acute in research with students with low-incidence disabilities, with whom few randomized controlled trials have been conducted. SERA seeks to leverage crowdsourcing to flip “research planning from ‘what is the best we can do with the resources we have to investigate our question,’ to ‘what is the best way to investigate our question, so that we can decide what resources to recruit’” (Uhlmann et al., 2019, p. 713). Conducting multiple, concurrent replication studies will allow us to not only examine average effects across research sites, but also to examine variability between sites.

How do you plan to develop and test SERA?

To pilot SERA, we are currently developing the infrastructure (project website, training materials, etc.) and procedures—including for data management—to be applied in a study that will be conducted in the 2020/21 academic year. In that study, we will conceptually replicate Scruggs, Mastropieri, and Sullivan (1994) by examining the effects of direct and indirect teaching methods on the acquisition and retention of science facts among elementary-age students with high-functioning autism. Students will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (a) control, in which students are told 14 science facts (as an example, frog eggs sink to the bottom of the water); (b) interventionist-provided explanations, in which students are told 14 science facts with explanations from the interventionist (frog eggs sink to the bottom to avoid predators at the top of the water); and (c) student-generated explanations, in which the interventionist provides scaffolds to the student to generate their own explanation of each science fact (frog eggs sink to the bottom – why do you think they do?; what is at the top of the water that could harm the eggs?). Acquisition of facts and explanations will be assessed immediately after the intervention, and retention will be assessed after approximately 10 days. Twenty-three research partners, representing each of the nine U.S. Census districts, have agreed to conduct the intervention with a minimum of five students.

A map of the United States that is split up into different regions

One challenge with building an infrastructure platform for conducting replication studies is that the “science” of replication as a method has yet to be fully established. That is, there is not consensus on what replication means, how high-quality replication studies should be conducted in field settings, and appropriate statistical criteria for evaluating replication success. To address these concerns, the research team is collaborating with The University of Virginia’s School of Data Science to create the pilot SERA platform to facilitate distributed data collection across independent research sites. The platform is based on the Causal Replication Framework (Steiner, Wong, & Anglin, 2019; Wong & Steiner, 2018) for designing, conducting, and analyzing high-quality replication studies and utilizes data-science methods for efficiently collecting and processing information. Subsequent phases of SERA will focus on expanding the platform so that it is available for systematic replication research for the broader education research community.

How does SERA align with the IES Standards for Excellence in Education Research (SEER)?

With its focus on systematically conducting multiple replication studies across research sites, SERA aligns closely with and will address the following SEER principles.

  • Pre-register studies: To be implemented with fidelity across multiple research partners and sites, crowdsourced study procedures have to be carefully planned and documented, which will facilitate pre-registration. We will pre-register the SERA pilot study in the Registry of Efficacy and Effectiveness.
  • Make findings, methods, and data open: Because of the data platform being developed to merge study results across more than 20 research sites, data will be in a clean and sharable format upon completion of the study. We are committed to the principles of open science and plan to share our data, as well as freely accessible study materials and research reports, on the Open Science Framework.
  • Document treatment implementation and contrast: Using audio transcripts of sessions and fidelity rubrics, SERA will introduce novel ways for utilizing natural language processing methods to evaluate the fidelity and replicability of treatment conditions across sites. These measures will allow the research team to assess and improve intervention delivery while researchers are in the field, as well as to characterize and evaluate treatment contrast in the analysis phase.
  • Analyze interventions' costs: It will not only be important to examine the costs for implementing SERA as a whole, but also the costs of the intervention implemented by the individual research teams. To this end, we are adapting and distributing easy-to-use tools and resources that will allow our research partners to collect data on ingredients and costs related to implementing a pilot intervention and replicating study results.
  • Facilitate generalization of study findings: Because SERA studies involve large, diverse, and representative samples of research participants; multiple and diverse research locations; and multiple and diverse researchers, results are likely to generalize.
  • Support scaling of promising results: Crowdsourced studies, by their nature, examine scaling by investigating whether and how findings replicate across multiple samples, locations, and researchers.

Conducting research across multiple sites and researchers raises important questions: What types of interventions can be implemented? What is the most efficient and reliable approach to collecting, transferring, and merging data across sites? It will also lead to challenges (such as IRB issues, promoting and assessing fidelity) that we are working to address in our planning and pilot study. Despite these challenges, we believe that crowdsourcing research in education may provide important benefits.

This blog was co-authored by Bryan Cook (bc3qu@virginia.edu), Bill Therrien (wjt2c@virginia.edu), and Vivian Wong (vcw2n@virginia.edu) at the University of Virginia and Katie Taylor (Katherine.Taylor@ed.gov) at IES

 

Meeting the Literacy Needs of Students with Autism: What Do We Know and Where Do We Need to Go?

April is Autism Awareness Month, which celebrates the importance of people with autism, the contributions they make every day to our world, and what we are learning about improving outcomes for the growing number of people with autism. IES supports research in this area, primarily through grants funded by the National Center for Special Education Research. Dr. Emily Solari at the University of Virginia (UVA) was awarded an IES grant in 2018 to lead an autism-focused postdoctoral training program. This program provides postdoctoral fellows with extensive research training in the academic, behavioral, and social development of students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) from pre-K through their transition out of secondary school. Currently, their research focuses on literacy development, including reading comprehension and writing, in children with ASD.

Below we share a recent conversation with Dr. Solari about the importance of this work and what she and researchers at UVA are learning about literacy development.

What do we know about the needs of students with ASD in the area of literacy?

Photo of Dr. Emily Solari

Children with ASD have a unique constellation of strengths and weaknesses that impacts their academic development. Several studies by our research group and others have shown that children and adolescents with ASD are at risk for difficulties in the area of literacy. Some individuals with ASD show a particular strength in alphabet knowledge, including letter names and sounds, as well as reading words. A strength in word reading ability does not always translate into adequate reading comprehension. Many adolescents with ASD who can successfully read words still demonstrate difficulties with reading comprehension, especially comprehension that requires inferencing. Difficulties may be due, in part, to the highly social content that is embedded in stories. Children with ASD often struggle in the area of social communication and theory of mind (understanding others’ mental states), which may inhibit their ability to comprehend narrative texts. Additionally, we know that vocabulary and oral language are both important for reading comprehension; therefore, difficulties in these areas – often seen in individuals with ASD – may impact reading comprehension as well.

Similarly, the existing data show that children with ASD have a more difficult time with writing-related tasks, such as composition. Our work in this area suggests that these writing difficulties may be due to broader difficulties related to language development and social communication skills. 

What research is being done to address the needs of students at different ages?

While we are beginning to understand developmental trajectories of reading for this population, very little research has been conducted on specific interventions for reading and writing. Our research group has begun to look at early elementary (K-3rd grade) language and reading comprehension interventions for students with ASD. Our initial studies have shown that when we implement highly interactive language and listening comprehension instruction, these students show gains in oral language and listening comprehension. We have found that instructional strategies that use shared book reading, where the teacher reads aloud from a book and asks children targeted questions about the characters in the story, are effective. Our instruction also provides students practice with vocabulary words and opportunities to respond to texts both orally and through writing.

There are also other research groups investigating emergent literacy (prekindergarten years) with this population of students. For example, Jaclyn Dynia at The Ohio State University has engaged in work investigating strengths and weaknesses in emergent literacy skills such as phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and print awareness.  Also, in the early childhood years, Dr. Veronica Fleury at Florida State University is engaged in some work in this area, including an IES-funded study aimed at developing and testing the feasibility of an adaptive shared book reading intervention for preschoolers with ASD. 

To address difficulties in reading comprehension with older students, Michael Solis and his team at the University of California, Riverside are using IES funding to develop and test explicit instructional routines and curricular materials for a reading comprehension and behavior intervention for students with ASD in upper elementary and middle school.

In collaboration with our colleagues at the University of California, Davis, we continue to analyze and publish developmental studies examining literacy skills. Additionally, we have become increasingly interested in understanding the transition from prekindergarten to kindergarten and early elementary school and how literacy is developing during this time. At UVA, we have started a longitudinal data collection project to investigate the relations among early reading, oral language, social attention, and cognition variables in young children with higher functioning ASD.

Our group is also starting to think about how we can design interventions that specifically target early reading skills and language development as well as social communication skills. Children’s books often provide very rich opportunities to engage around events and feelings that could be used to teach children with ASD social communication skills. Our next school-based intervention study will combine our previously successful language and listening instruction with targeted social communication instruction.

What recommendations or resources do you have for parents who are supporting children with ASD as they learn from home during the pandemic?

Here are some tips for reading at home with children. Additional resources are below.

  • Friends on the Block was developed through an IES grant as an early literacy curriculum for children with disabilities.  They have provided some free content online for use at home by caregivers.
  • Self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) is an approach that emphasizes direct instruction of writing strategies, knowledge, and self-regulation skills via flexible, recursive instructional stages. SRSD approaches have been shown to be effective for some elementary and middle school children with autism.
  • Book Share Time provides read aloud texts and allows caregivers to filter the books based on specific speech or language goals.

This blog was co-authored by Sarah Brasiel (Sarah.Brasiel@ed.gov), Amy Sussman (Amy.Sussman@ed.gov), Katie Taylor (Katherine.Taylor@ed.gov) at IES and Emily Solari (ejs9ea@virginia.edu), and her IES funded postdoctoral fellows (Alyssa Henry & Matthew Zajic) at UVA.  IES hopes to encourage more research on students with ASD in the coming years in order to increase the evidence base and guide program and policy decisions.