Inside IES Research

The Early Career Development and Mentoring Program in Special Education provides support for investigators in the early stages of their academic careers to conduct an integrated research and career development plan focused on learners with or at risk for disabilities. Dr. Jason Chow is an assistant professor of special education at the University of Maryland, College Park and principal investigator of a current Early Career grant funded by NCSER. Dr. Chow’s research focuses on the comorbidity of language and behavior disorders in school-age children as well as teacher and related service provider training in behavior management. We recently caught up with Dr. Chow to learn more about his career, the experiences that have shaped it, and the lessons he’s learned from the Early Career grant. This is what he shared with us.

How did your experiences shape your interest in a career in special education?

I first became interested in education when I started substituting for paraprofessionals in special education programs over winter and summer breaks in college, which I really enjoyed. That experience, along with a class I took in my senior year on disability in the media and popular culture, got me interested in the field of special education. After I graduated, I ended up applying for a full-time position as a paraprofessional in a program supporting high schoolers with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD).

My experiences as a paraprofessional definitely shaped my career path. As a substitute paraprofessional in college, I was surprised that my job was to support students with the most intensive needs even though I had the least amount of classroom training. That made me recognize the need for research-based training and supports for related service providers and got me interested in different factors that contribute to decision making in school systems. Another memorable experience occurred when I was working in the support program for students with EBD. All our students had the accommodation to be able to come to our room at any time of the day as needed for a check in or a break. I was alarmed by how often students needed a break because of things teachers said or did to upset them or make them feel singled out. I was also coaching several sports at the time and saw first-hand how a strong, positive relationships with the players were vital. These experiences got me interested in teacher-student relationships, how important positive interactions and experiences can be, and the need for general education teachers to receive training on working with students with disabilities. Ultimately, my work as a paraprofessional supporting kids with EBD also helped shape my interest in determining how language and communication can facilitate prosocial development, which led to my Early Career grant.

What are the goals of your NCSER Early Career grant?

My project focuses on better understanding the co-development of language and behavior in children at risk for language disorders, behavior disorders, or both in early elementary school. Many studies have examined the concurrent and developmental relations between language and behavior, but they are typically done using extant datasets. The goal of this project was to conduct a prospective study aimed at measuring both constructs in several different ways (such as direct observations, interviews, and teacher report) to provide a more robust analysis of how each of these constructs and assessment types are related over time. This type of research could inform the types of interventions provided to children with EBD and, more specifically, the need to address language impairments alongside behavior to improve academic outcomes for these learners.

How has the Early Career grant helped your development as a researcher?

This project has taught me a lot about the realities of doing school-based research and managing a grant. First, I have learned a great deal about budgeting. For example, I proposed to recruit a sample based on a power analysis I conducted for the grant application. But in my original budget, I did not consider that I would need to screen about triple the number of children I estimated in order to enroll my planned sample. I have also learned a lot about hiring, human resources, procurement, and university policies that are directly and indirectly involved in process of conducting research. Also, like many others, my project was impacted by pandemic-related school closures, and I have learned how to be flexible under unpredictable circumstances. More specifically, we had intended to determine how developmental trajectories of language and behavior were associated with academic outcomes, but we lost our outcome assessment timepoint due to the pandemic. Fortunately, we are working collaboratively with our partner schools to use district-level data to approximate some of these intended analyses. I’m thankful that I had the opportunity to learn and develop my skills in the context of a training grant.

What advice would you give to other early career researchers, including those who may be interested in applying for an Early Career grant?

Reach out to other early career grantees and ask for their proposals. (I am happy to share mine!) Just be aware that the RFA has changed over time—including a substantial increase in funds—so the more recent proposals the better. Also, in terms of setting up a strong mentorship team for your career development plan, reach out to the people whom you see as the best to support your career development (no matter how busy you think they are or if you think they are too senior). In talking with other folks, I’ve learned that generally people are very willing to support the next generation of researchers!

This interview blog is part of a larger IES blog series on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) in the education sciences. It was produced by Katie Taylor (Katherine.Taylor@ed.gov), program officer for the Early Career Development and Mentoring program at the National Center for Special Education Research.

A key challenge when conducting cost analysis as part of an efficacy study is producing information that can be useful for addressing questions related to replicability or scale. When the study is a follow up conducted many years after the implementation, the need to collect data retrospectively introduces additional complexities. As part of a recent follow-up efficacy study, Maya Escueta and Tyler Watts of Teachers College, Columbia University worked with the IES-funded Cost Analysis in Practice (CAP) project team to plan a cost analysis that would meet these challenges. This guest blog describes their process and lessons learned and provides resources for other researchers.

What was the intervention for which you estimated costs retrospectively?

We estimated the costs of a pre-kindergarten intervention, the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP), which was implemented in nine Head Start Centers in Chicago, Illinois for two cohorts of students in 2004-5 and 2005-6. CSRP was an early childhood intervention that targeted child self-regulation by attempting to overhaul teacher approaches to behavioral management. The intervention placed licensed mental health clinicians in classrooms, and these clinicians worked closely with teachers to reduce stress and improve the classroom climate. CSRP showed signs of initial efficacy on measures of preschool behavioral and cognitive outcomes, but more recent results from the follow-up study showed mainly null effects for the participants in late adolescence.

The IES research centers require a cost study for efficacy projects, so we faced the distinct challenge of conducting a cost analysis for an intervention nearly 20 years after it was implemented. Our goal was to render the cost estimates useful for education decision-makers today to help them consider whether to replicate or scale such an intervention in their own context.

What did you learn during this process?

When enumerating costs and considering how to implement an intervention in another context or at scale, we learned four distinct lessons.

1. Consider how best to scope the analysis to render the findings both credible and relevant given data limitations.

In our case, because we were conducting the analysis 20 years after the intervention was originally implemented, the limited availability of reliable data—a common challenge in retrospective cost analysis—posed two challenges. We had to consider the data we could reasonably obtain and what that would mean for the type of analysis we could credibly conduct. First, because no comprehensive cost analysis was conducted at the time of the intervention’s original implementation (to our knowledge), we could not accurately collect costs on the counterfactual condition. Second, we also lacked reliable measures of key outcomes over time, such as grade retention or special education placement that would be required for calculating a complete cost-benefit analysis. This meant we were limited in both the costs and the effects we could reliably estimate. Due to these data limitations, we could only credibly conduct a cost analysis, rather than a cost-effectiveness analysis or cost-benefit analysis, which generally produce more useful evidence to aid in decisions about replication or scale.

Because of this limitation, and to provide useful information for decision-makers who are considering implementing similar interventions in their current contexts, we decided to develop a likely present-day implementation scenario informed by the historical information we collected from the original implementation. We’ll expand on how we did this and the decisions we made in the following lessons.

2. Consider how to choose prices to improve comparability and to account for availability of ingredients at scale.

We used national average prices for all ingredients in this cost analysis to make the results more comparable to other cost analyses of similar interventions that also use national average prices. This involved some careful thought about how to price ingredients that were unique to the time or context of the original implementation, specific to the intervention, or in low supply. For example, when identifying prices for personnel, we either used current prices (national average salaries plus fringe benefits) for personnel with equivalent professional experience, or we inflation-adjusted the original consulting fees charged by personnel in highly specialized roles. This approach assumes that personnel who are qualified to serve in specialized roles are available on a wider scale, which may not always be the case.

In the original implementation of CSRP, spaces were rented for teacher behavior management workshops, stress reduction workshops, and initial training of the mental health clinicians. For our cost analysis, we assumed that using available school facilities were more likely and tenable when implementing CSRP at large scale. Instead of using rental prices, we valued the physical space needed to implement CSRP by using amortized construction costs of school facilities (for example, cafeteria/gym/classroom). We obtained these from the CAP Project’s Cost of Facilities Calculator.

3. Consider how to account for ingredients that may not be possible to scale.

Some resources are simply not available in similar quality at large scale. For example, the Principal Investigator (PI) for the original evaluation oversaw the implementation of the intervention, was highly invested in the fidelity of implementation, was willing to dedicate significant time, and created a culture that was supportive of the pre-K instructors to encourage buy-in for the intervention. In such cases, it is worth considering what her equivalent role would be in a non-research setting and how scalable this scenario would be. A potential proxy for the PI in this case may be a school principal or leader, but how much time could this person reasonably dedicate, and how similar would their skillset be?  

4. Consider how implementation might work in institutional contexts required for scale.

Institutional settings might necessarily change when taking an intervention to scale. In larger-scale settings, there may be other ways of implementing the intervention that might change the quantities of personnel and other resources required. For example, a pre-K intervention such as CSRP at larger scale may need to be implemented in various types of pre-K sites, such as public schools or community-based centers in addition to Head Start centers. In such cases, the student/teacher ratio may vary across different institutional contexts, which has implications for the per-student cost. If delivered in a manner where the student/ teacher ratio is higher than in the original implementation, the intervention may be less costly, but may also be less impactful. This highlights the importance of the institutional setting in which implementation is occurring, and how this might affect the use and costs of resources.

How can other researchers get assistance in conducting a cost analysis?

In conducting this analysis, we found the following CAP Project tools to be especially helpful (found on the CAP Resources page and the CAP Project homepage):

• The Cost of Facilities Calculator: A tool that helps estimate the cost of physical spaces (facilities).
• Cost Analysis Templates: Semi-automated Excel templates that support cost analysis calculations.
• CAP Project Help Desk: Real-time guidance from a member of the CAP Project team. You will receive help in troubleshooting challenging issues with experts who can share specific resources. Submit a help desk request by visiting this page.

Maya Escueta is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University where she researches the effects of poverty alleviation policies and parenting interventions on the early childhood home environment.

Tyler Watts is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development at Teachers College, Columbia University. His research focuses on the connections between early childhood education and long-term outcomes.

For questions about the CSRP project, please contact the NCER program officer, Corinne.Alfeld@ed.gov. For questions about the CAP project, contact Allen.Ruby@ed.gov.

The National Center for Education Research convened a virtual technical working group (TWG) of education policy leaders and researchers to discuss strategies for improving K-12 education systems and policy research funded by NCER. The official summary is now posted on the IES website. This blog post provides a snapshot of that summary.

What are the most pressing education systems and policy issues in need of research?

Prior to the meeting, TWG members were asked to identify what policy topics need evidence to inform their decision making, and they identified over 20 issues of pressing concern. The top-identified education policy issues, with at least 3 nominations across both policy leader and researcher groups, are listed below (with the number of nominations in parentheses).

• Equitable access to high quality instruction (13)
• Education technology and online instruction (11)
• Equity in school and student funding (10)
• Diversity of teachers and equity of pay (8)
• Socio-emotional learning (SEL), relationships and student engagement (8)
• Leader Professional Development (6)
• Teacher professional development (5)
• Better capacity for data analysis management, communication (5)
• Early childhood education (5)
• Career preparation/advising/transitions (5)
• Culturally relevant pedagogy/anti-racism/anti-bias (3)
• Special education/English Learners (3)
• Covid-related learning loss (3)

The discussion during the meeting focused on a broad range of policy, research, and dissemination issues, which did not always align with the above issues. NCER staff organized the themes from the day’s discussion below to highlight where the TWG members expressed general consensus. More detail about each area can be found in the full TWG summary on the IES website.

• Understanding and Addressing Inequity in Education Systems: The TWG members agreed that the most pressing issue is equity. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated and revealed systemic inequity, which affects students who are from racial/ethnic minority backgrounds, low-income households, or other marginalized groups.
• Improving Use of and Access to Education Technology and High-Quality Online Instruction: With the heavy reliance on online instruction throughout the pandemic, COVID-19 has created new urgency for closing the digital divide. In addition to understanding how systems support or impede access to education technology, TWG members also noted a need for education research focused on questions of teaching and learning in remote and hybrid environments, including professional development and systems-level support for both teachers and students for using and engaging with technology.
• Recruiting and Retaining a Diverse Teaching Workforce: TWG members noted that teacher shortages, especially in high poverty districts, have been a concern for years, and that there is a need for evidence on how to make access to high quality teachers more equitable. Researchers could examine how recruitment strategies can diversify the teacher workforce through strategies such as incentives specifically for teacher candidates of color and adopting culturally relevant practices.
• Providing Access to Student and Educator Mental Health Supports: TWG members observed that COVID-19 has been stressful for students, parents, and educators. Remote learning appears to prevent many students from connections that support emotional and behavioral health and to increase the vulnerability of students with high-risk home environments. Research and research syntheses are needed to guide policymakers on what works best in allocating resources to meet student and educator mental health needs and how to connect with community resources and improve systems of support beyond the school.
• Engaging and Re-Engaging Students: Chronic absenteeism is a major problem in many schools, exacerbated by the pandemic. TWG members pointed out that a key policy question for many LEAs and SEAs is how to re-engage these “missing” students. Researchers can help education leaders understand what evidence-based interventions are available to re-engage students and begin to address disparities in pandemic learning loss.
• Preparing K-12 Students for Careers: TWG members agreed that researchers, policymakers, and educators should engage and collaborate more frequently with employers to inform what career-aligned experiences should be offered to students in school. Research could contribute to understanding how best to support local communities of practice that include schools, businesses, intermediaries, and community-based organizations with the shared goal of preparing students for careers.
• Modernizing Assessments: TWG members agreed that education systems should be modernized to assess and address basic skills and learning needs quickly, such as with interim or formative assessments. Research is needed to understand how to use assessment for both accountability purposes as well as to support diagnosis and student progress monitoring. Additionally, research is needed to guide educators on authentic and performance-based assessments.
• Improving Data-Driven Decision-Making in Schools: TWG members noted that education researchers could provide guidance on identifying a set of core variables, systematically collecting data and metrics, and building data sharing platforms and data agreements. TWG members pointed out that, in many cases, education agencies and educators do not necessarily need more data but more training to build capacity to analyze and use the data they have.
• Examining Education Finance: TWG members noted that research can generate high-quality information to help policymakers understand how school systems could leverage financial resources to help the most underserved learners and communities. TWG participants noted that a key question for which additional evidence is needed is how much funding is needed to provide the breadth of services, including wraparound services, required to support learning in the poorest schools.
• Creating Adaptive Education Systems: COVID-19 has shown that education systems must better prepare for emergencies, and TWG members worried that the pandemic will have a lasting effect on student achievement and attainment. The COVID-19 pandemic has provided the education and research community with an opportunity to learn from what went well, what did not, and to propose strategies to put in place to ensure rapid responses to future emergencies and moments of crisis.

How can NCER better support research on education systems/policy issues?

NCER staff asked for recommendations on improving its engagement with education systems and policy work. TWG member recommendations are organized according to five themes.

• Support a Systems Approach to Systems and Policy Research: TWG members recommended that NCER encourage researchers to untangle and understand broader, dynamic education systems and processes, and to develop methods that capture and account for changing contexts. The TWG encouraged an interdisciplinary approach with different stakeholder perspectives, methods, and measures to move the field forward.
• Encourage Partnerships with Key Stakeholders: TWG members felt that the relevance of research proposals could be increased with more collaboration between researchers and education leaders. Partnership between researchers and practitioners is one strategy for increasing the local relevance of research and its applicability to specific local questions.
• Support Rapid Research to Practice Efforts: TWG members agreed that education policy research results should be disseminated to the field quickly. Rapid cycle evaluation methods, such as plan-do-study-act continuous quality improvement approaches can help to inform policy solutions, and while not nimble enough to support quick turnaround studies, NCER funding may be appropriate for continuous improvement methods that are applied within a longer-term research project.
• Disseminate Information that is Useful to Policymakers: TWG members agreed that NCER research results should be relevant and presented in easy-to-read formats tailored for specific stakeholder audiences. To address this issue, IES can create easy-to-understand research syntheses, as education leaders do not have time or training to comb through the results of individual studies. In addition, TWG members identified a need for research on what is needed for practitioners to translate research to practice, to support decision making, and to address barriers to implementation.
• Attend to Equity in Grantmaking and Research Focus: TWG members were concerned about equity in grantmaking and broadening participation in the research process. One way to address this is to provide more structured technical assistance to ensure applicants new to IES funding develop competitive research proposals. Active outreach can also help to encourage experts most likely to address equity research questions to apply. TWG members also pointed out that interdisciplinary research teams could help unearth embedded inequities in data collection, measures, and models.

In addition to the ideas discussed above, TWG members suggested specific ideas for how NCER could support research that leads to policy and systems improvement. These are too numerous to include here, but they are described in full in the TWG summary report.

For questions about this blog or the TWG summary, please contact Corinne.Alfeld@ed.gov, NCER Program Officer for the Improving Education Systems topic.

Recent studies of gifted and talented programs indicate that the extent and quality of services available to gifted students vary from state to state, district to district, and even from school to school within school districts. In a project titled “Are Gifted Programs Beneficial to Underserved Students?” (PI: William Darity, Duke University), IES-funded researchers are examining the variability of Black and Hispanic students’ access to gifted programs in North Carolina and the potential impact of participation in these gifted programs on Black and Hispanic student outcomes. In this interview blog, we asked co-PIs Malik Henfield and Kristen Stephens to discuss the motivation for their study and preliminary findings.

What motivated your team to study the outcomes of Black and Hispanic students in gifted programs?

The disproportionality between the representation of white students and students of color in gifted education programs is both persistent and pervasive. For decades, we’ve both been working with teachers and school counselors seeking to increase the number of students of color in gifted education programs, but what happens once these students are placed in these programs? We know very little about the educational, social, and emotional impact that participation (or non-participation) has on students. Gifted education programs are widely believed to provide the best educational opportunity for students, but given the impacts race and socioeconomic status have on student success factors, this may not be a sound assumption. In fact, there is negligible (and often contradictory) published research that explores whether gifted programs contribute to beneficial academic and social-emotional outcomes for the underserved students who participate in them. Resolving this question will have tremendous implications for future gifted education policies.

Please tell us about your study. What have you learned so far?

With funding from IES, researchers from Duke University and Loyola University Chicago are collaborating to describe how gifted education policies in North Carolina are interpreted, implemented, and monitored at the state, district, and school levels. We are also estimating how these policies are related to Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students’ academic and social-emotional outcomes. We hope our examination of individual student characteristics, sociocultural contexts, and environmental factors will help improve the ways school systems identify and serve gifted students from traditionally underrepresented groups.

Although preliminary, there are several interesting findings from our study. Our analysis of district-level gifted education plans highlights promising equity practices (for example, using local norms to determine gifted program eligibility) as well as potential equity inhibitors (for example, relying predominantly on teacher referral). Our secondary data analysis reveals that the majority of school districts do not have equitable representation of Black and Hispanic students in gifted programs. Disproportionality was calculated using the Relative Difference in Composition Index (RDCI). The RDCI represents the difference between a group’s composition in gifted education programs and their composition across the school district expressed as a discrepancy percentage.

What’s Next?

In North Carolina, districts are allowed to interpret state policy and implement programs and support services in ways they deem appropriate. Our next step is to conduct an in-depth qualitative exploration of variations in policy within and across North Carolina school districts. In these forthcoming analyses, we will be looking only at youth identified as underserved along the racial/ethnic minority dimension. In each district, we plan to interview four distinct groups to better understand their greatest assets, needs, challenges, and resources they would find most valuable to facilitate successful academic and social-emotional outcomes: (1) high-achieving underserved students identified as gifted, (2) high-achieving underserved students not identified as gifted, (3) teachers, and (4) school counselors.

For example, we are interested in learning—

• How educators interpret identification processes from policies
• How educators perceive recruitment and retention processes and their role in them
• How ethnic minority students identified as gifted perceive recruitment and retention processes
• How ethnic minority students not selected for participation in gifted education programming perceive the recruitment process
• How both student groups make sense of their racial identity

We will then combine what we learned from studies 1-3 (using secondary data) with Study 4 (research in schools) and share the results with policymakers, educators, and the research community.

What advice would you like to share with other researchers who are studying access to gifted programs?

There are three recommendations we would like to share:

• Investigate instructional interventions that impact short- and long-term academic and social-emotional outcomes for gifted students. The field of gifted education has spent significant time and resources attempting to determine the best methods for identifying gifted students across all racial/ethnic groups. Nonetheless, disparities in representation still exist, and this hyper-focus on identification has come at the expense of increasing our understanding of what types of interventions work, for whom, and under what conditions.
• Conduct more localized research studies. Since gifted education programs are largely de-centralized, there is considerable variance in how policies are created and implemented across states, districts, and schools. For example, eligibility criteria for participation in gifted programs can differ significantly across school systems.  In NC, “cut score” percentages on achievement and aptitude tests can range from the 85th to the 99th percentile. This makes it difficult to generalize research findings across contexts when participant samples aren’t adequately comparable. 
• Extend beyond the identification question and consider both generalizability and transferability when designing the research methodology. For generalizability, this entails carefully selecting the sample population and the methods for developing causal models. For transferability, this means providing a detailed account of the ecosystem in which the research is taking place so that practitioners can see the utility of the findings and recommendations within their own contexts. Mixed methods studies would certainly help bridge the relationship between the two. 

Dr. Malik S. Henfield is a full professor and founding dean of the Institute for Racial Justice at Loyola University Chicago. His scholarship situates Black students' lived experiences in a broader ecological milieu to critically explore how their personal, social, academic, and career success is impeded and enhanced by school, family, and community contexts. His work to date has focused heavily on the experiences of Black students formally identified as gifted/high achieving.

Dr. Kristen R. Stephens is an associate professor of the Practice in the Program in Education at Duke University. She studies legal and policy issues related to gifted education at the federal, state, and local levels--particularly around how such policies contribute to beneficial academic, social-emotional, and behavioral outcomes for traditionally underserved gifted students.

This interview blog is part of a larger IES blog series on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) in the education sciences. It was produced by Katina Stapleton (Katina.Stapleton@ed.gov), co-chair of the IES Diversity and Inclusion Council. For more information about the study, please contact the program officer, Corinne Alfeld (Corinne.Alfeld@ed.gov).

The prevalence of children identified as having autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has increased steadily in the last 20 years. Early identification and intervention is important, a point that is underscored by the CDC’s campaign Learn the Signs. Act Early. To recognize April’s Autism Awareness Month, NCSER is highlighting two projects supporting the capacity of parents and educators to intervene in children’s early development.

Assisting Early Interventionists in Facilitating Parent Mediation of Learning

Researchers Hannah Schertz (left, Indiana University) and Kathleen Baggett (right, Georgia State University) have developed a framework to improve the social communication skills of toddlers showing signs of ASD with a system that guides early interventionists (EIs) to support parents. The program, Supporting Early Interventionists of Toddlers with Autism to Build Family Capacity (SEITA), aims to help EIs to work with parents as they integrate interventions into natural interactions with their children. EIs learn to guide parents in understanding when their child is engaging in social communication and in implementing learning strategies to enhance these competencies during parent-child interactions. More specifically, EIs guide parents in applying four mediated strategies to promote engagement in learning: focusing, giving meaning, encouraging, and expanding. For example, one strategy they use is to facilitate guided reflection on a just-recorded video of parent-child interactions.

As the researchers test the promise of the intervention, they report that EIs have conducted the intervention with fidelity in both home-based and telehealth contexts. They have found that parents in the study demonstrated clear improvements in their use of at least two mediated learning strategies and have been able to implement intervention practices with fidelity when working with their children. The researchers also track the children’s progress on social reciprocity, joint attention, positive social behavior, and social play, and results will be analyzed when data collection is complete.

Investigating the Long-Term Benefits of an Elementary Intervention

The IAR team (from left to right): James P. Donnelly, Marcus L. Thomeer, Christopher Lopata, and Jonathan D. Rodgers

As children age into elementary grades, their primary site of intervention becomes the school. In 2008, NCSER funded the development of the comprehensive school-based intervention (CSBI) to support the social competencies of children with high functioning autism spectrum disorder (HFASD). This multi-prong approach includes interactive computer instruction to teach children to recognize emotions, social skills groups, therapeutic peer group activities to practice social skills, daily behavioral notes, and monthly parent training. A 2013 NCSER-funded randomized controlled trial of CSBI found that students with HFASD who participated in CSBI improved significantly in measures of social cognition, social-communication skills, and ASD symptoms compared to students with HFASD who received typical instruction.

To assess the intervention’s ability to impact long-term student development, Christopher Lopata and his colleagues James Donnelly, Marcus Thomeer, and Jonathan Rodgers (Canisius College) are following up on the initial efficacy trial to study the middle and high school students who participated in CSBI in elementary school. They are measuring student social cognition, social communication skills, ASD symptoms, and academic achievement at the beginning and end of two consecutive school years to examine lasting impacts of the CSBI program. Although data are still being analyzed from this project, it is notable that because data collection occurred as the COVID-19 pandemic caused school shutdowns, the PIs were able to examine the potential effects of stay-at-home restrictions on these students. There have been widespread concerns that disruptions to routines, curtailed social opportunities, and removal of support services associated with shutdowns could have deleterious effects on children with ASD. However, Lopata and colleagues found no significant differences between data collected before stay-at-home restrictions and data collected 4 months after the restrictions on ASD symptoms, adaptive behaviors, or social communication.

NCSER will continue to share the final results of these studies, as well as additional research focused on supporting children with ASD, in the future.

Written by Julianne Kasper, Virtual Student Federal Service Intern at IES and graduate student in Education Policy & Leadership at American University, and by Emily Weaver (Emily.Weaver@ed.gov), NCSER program officer who oversees ASD grants.