Inside IES Research

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, NCSER would like to discuss special education teacher burnout and its connection to America’s teacher shortage crisis. Special education teachers are essential to our nation’s ability to provide a free and appropriate public education to the 7.3 million students with disabilities that attend our public schools. But significant shortages in qualified special educators affect the ability of our public schools to provide equal educational opportunities for all students.

A nationwide survey of schools in 2022 reported that vacancies in special education were nearly double that of other subject areas. This survey also found that 65% of public schools in the United States reported being understaffed in special education. Even prior to the pandemic, there was a downward trend in the number of special education teachers. One study found the numbers decreased by 17% between the years 2005-12. Research has also shown that the number of teachers leaving the field of special education is among the largest contributors to the growing shortage. High job demands without adequate support and resources may lead to teacher burnout, which may, in turn, lead to teachers leaving the profession. Because teacher burnout and general working conditions are real concerns, NCSER has funded projects to take a closer look at this problem and find potential solutions. This blog highlights a few of these projects below.

NCSER-Funded Studies on Special Educator Burnout

Elizabeth Bettini at Boston University led a research project exploring special educator working conditions. The research aimed to provide an understanding of how instructional resources, planning time, and support from colleagues affect teacher instruction and student outcomes, as well as explore how administrators view their role in providing supportive working conditions for special educators. They found that teachers who provided high-quality instruction had a trusted co-teacher, consistent paraprofessionals with time and support for training, and protected time for instruction.

To help prevent burnout among special education teachers, Lisa Ruble at Ball State University has been developing and testing an intervention called BREATHE (Burnout Reduction: Enhanced Awareness, Tools, Handouts, and Education). As part of the larger project, the research team explored the longitudinal trajectory of burnout. The first wave of data collection occurred in Fall 2020 during the pandemic and analyses from that particular wave of data collection demonstrated that out of the 468 participating special educators from across the United States, approximately 38% met clinical criteria for generalized anxiety disorder and 38% for major depressive disorder—rates that are several times greater than those in the general U.S. population. Additionally, teachers indicated that the pandemic had a moderate to extreme impact on stress (91%), depression (58%), anxiety (76%), and emotional exhaustion (83%). The research team is still analyzing all the data from the pilot study.

At Pennsylvania State University, Jennifer Frank is leading a research project examining the efficacy of Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education (CARE). In prior research, the CARE program was shown to improve teacher outcomes (such as improving emotion regulation and reducing distress) and enhance classroom interactions in general education settings, but it had not been studied in a special education context. The current project is examining whether there are similar positive impacts of the intervention on outcomes for special education teachers and students with disabilities.

Justin Garwood at the University of Vermont is leading a research project aimed at understanding risk factors related to special education teacher burnout, such as role stressors, relationships with colleagues, and behavior management abilities. Ultimately, this project aims to collect data that could help target interventions for preventing or reducing special education teacher burnout and improving educator and student outcomes.

NCSER would like to thank all our researchers for their dedication and continued efforts to find solutions that support educators and students. We look forward to seeing the final results of the projects described here. We would also like to extend our deepest gratitude to the special education teachers and support staff in our nation’s schools.

This blog was written by Shanna Bodenhamer, virtual student federal service intern at IES and graduate student at Texas A&M University. Katie Taylor is the NCSER program officer for the Educators and School-Based Service Providers portfolio and the other programs that support the projects presented in this blog.

In honor of Autism Awareness Month, we’d like to highlight an IES-funded research project on autism spectrum disorder and discuss how the current framework of neurodiversity informs this research. In recent years, the neurodiversity paradigm has been an increasingly popular way of viewing autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions. Neurodiversity is a term coined in the late 1990s by Judy Singer to refer to natural human variation in neurotypes. Neurodivergent individuals diverge from the norm, usually with conditions such as autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or dyslexia. Rather than focusing on deficits, this paradigm supports a strength-based view of these conditions while still acknowledging individual challenges. For this blog, we interviewed Dr. Jan Blacher and Dr. Abbey Eisenhower, principal investigators who created a professional development (PD) program supporting general education teachers of students on the autism spectrum. In the interview below, the researchers describe how their PD program works and how it uses the neurodiversity paradigm to strengthen relationships between autistic students and their teachers.

What is Smooth Sailing and what led you to develop it?

Smooth Sailing is the nickname for our PD for general education teachers in kindergarten through second grade who have at least one student on the autism spectrum in their classrooms. The catalyst for the program was the findings from our previous project on student-teacher relationships, indicating that teachers are central to facilitating positive school experiences, especially for autistic students. Warm, positive student-teacher relationships are predictive of academic engagement and social adjustment.

The program provides coaching-based support for teachers, equips them with strategies for building strong relationships with autistic students, and enables them to expand on their students' strengths and interests in the classroom. Developed by educators, clinicians, and researchers in partnership with teachers and autistic individuals, Smooth Sailing uses an autism-affirming, neurodiversity perspective throughout the program.

What makes this program unique?                                                                                                                

Smooth Sailing recognizes the importance of relationships—especially student-teacher relationships—in making school a positive and welcoming place for students.

Our program prioritizes a neurodiversity perspective on autism: We recognize autism as a set of differences that are part of the diversity of human experience. In order to best support autistic students, we must provide an affirming context that embraces their strengths and differences. This approach contrasts with a deficit-based model, which focuses on changing children and their behaviors. The deficit model could impair relationships between students and their teachers, making academic engagement and social adjustment worse.

Finally, Smooth Sailing is unique for centering on autistic people as key contributors to shaping program content so that the program reflects the lived realities of autistic students.

What have you learned while developing and testing the Smooth Sailing intervention?

We have learned several important lessons:

(1) During the initial research for our intervention, findings indicated that only 8% of general education teachers in the study had received any professional training in autism. This provides a clear-cut mandate for more autism-focused training for these educators.

(2) After the intervention, general education teachers endorsed three key Smooth Sailing strategies for reaching out to their autistic students: (a) identifying interests, (b) celebrating talents, and (c) having one-on-one time to form stronger relationships. We learned that these simple strategies are ones every teacher can adopt to create more inclusive classrooms and cultivate stronger relationships with students, especially autistic students.

(3) Overall, teachers who received the Smooth Sailing PD experienced significant improvements in the quality of their relationships with autistic students, including higher student-teacher closeness and lower student-teacher conflict, compared to teachers who had not received the program. Thus, in addition to other positive outcomes for teachers and children, we learned that our brief program (12 hours over 4 weeks) was sufficient for moving the needle on the critical construct of student-teacher relationship quality.

How does respect for neurodiversity inform the Smooth Sailing intervention and your philosophies as researchers?

One key factor that has been transformative to the resulting Smooth Sailing program has been our close consultation with current and former autistic students. As part of developing the Smooth Sailing program for teachers, our research team interviewed many autistic adolescents and adults about their school experiences, their advice for teachers, and their opinions on making schools more affirming and inclusive. In addition, we closely engaged autistic adults as expert consultants during our program development process. These consultants advised on teacher-focused content, reviewed materials, and weighed in on program changes.

The rich information we learned from the interviews and intensive consultation substantially impacted the content of the resulting program. To offer one example, these interviews showed us the outsized power of a positive student-teacher relationship, even with just one teacher, in making school a bearable place for autistic students.

Because many autistic students describe their school experiences as ableist and marginalizing, our team's programming aims to disrupt these school problems by building strong student-teacher relationships and fostering teachers' understanding of autism through an affirming, neurodiversity-informed lens. By incorporating first-person perspectives of autistic students and adults in its creation and content, our programs affirm the lived realities of autistic students. 

What needs are still unmet for general education teachers working with autistic students?

We have heard from teachers and administrators at all K-12 levels—high school, middle school, and later elementary school—that they would like access to similar autism-focused PD programs targeted to the student age ranges they teach. We think that creating a school culture that affirms neurodiversity starts by fostering understanding between students and all school staff, not just primary classroom teachers.  

What's next for the Smooth Sailing project?

We hope to expand the Smooth Sailing PD program to the early childhood education context. Unfortunately, our research has shown that, by the time they enter elementary school, one out of every six autistic children has been expelled from a preschool or childcare program. Viewed through a social justice lens, this preschool expulsion is an educational equity issue.

Early childhood educators are key to improving these early school experiences. We believe that preschool and childcare educators can be catalysts in providing an inclusive environment by forming strong relationships with autistic and neurodivergent children. That said, most early childhood educators report having no professional training in autism, feeling underprepared to meet the needs of autistic children, and wanting more support for inclusion. We hope that programs like Smooth Sailing can be applied to support educators working with preschool-age children who are autistic or neurodivergent, many of whom are not yet diagnosed, so that their first school experiences can be enriching and inclusive.

Jan Blacher is a distinguished research professor in the School of Education and the director of the SEARCH Family Autism Research Center at the University of California, Riverside. Abbey Eisenhower is an associate professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.   

This blog was authored by Juliette Gudknecht, an intern at IES, along with Emily Weaver (Emily.Weaver@ed.gov), program officer at NCSER with oversight of the portfolio of autism grants.

In celebration of IES’s 20^th anniversary, we’re telling the stories of our work and the significant impact that—together—we’ve had on education policy and practice. As IES continues to look towards a future focused on progress, purpose, and performance, Dr. Matthew G. Springer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discusses the merit pay debate and why the staying power of IES will continue to matter in the years to come.

Merit Pay for Teachers

There are very few issues that impact Americans more directly or more personally than education. The experience of school leaves people with deep memories, strong opinions, and a highly localized sense of how education works in a vast and diverse country. Bringing scientific rigor to a subject so near to people’s lives is incredibly important — and maddeningly hard. The idea of merit pay inspires strong reactions from politicians and the general public, but for a long time there was vanishingly little academic literature to support either the dismissive attitude of skeptics or the enthusiasm of supporters.

Given the stakes of the merit pay debate—the size of the nation’s teacher corps, the scale of local, state, and federal educational investments, and longstanding inequities in access to highly effective teachers—policymakers desperately need better insight into how teacher compensation might incentivize better outcomes. Critics worry merit pay creates negative competition, causes teachers to focus narrowly on incentivized outcomes, and disrupts the collegiate ethos of teaching and learning. On the other hand, supporters argue that merit pay helps motivate employees, attract and retain employees in the profession, and improve overall productivity.

Generating Evidence: The Role of IES-Funded Research

That’s precisely the kind of need that IES was designed to meet. In 2006, with the support of IES, I joined a group of research colleagues to launch the Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) to test some of the major theories around merit pay. We wanted to apply the most rigorous research design—a fully randomized control trial—to the real-world question of whether rewarding teachers for better student test scores would move the needle on student achievement.

But orchestrating a real-world experiment is much harder than doing an observational analysis. Creating a rigorous trial to assess merit pay required enormous diplomacy. There are a lot of stakeholders in American education, and conducting a meaningful test of different teacher pay regimes required signoff from the local branch of the teacher’s union, the national union, the local school board and elected leadership, and the state education bureaucracy all the way up to the governor. Running an experiment in a lab is one thing; running an experiment with real-world teachers leading real, live classrooms is quite another.

With IES support to carry out an independent and scientifically rigorous study, POINT was able to move forward with the support of the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools. The results were not what most anticipated. 

Despite offering up to $15,000 annually in incentive pay based on a value-added measure of teacher effectiveness, in general, we found no significant difference in student performance between the merit-pay recipients and teachers who weren’t eligible for bonuses. 

As with all good scientific findings, we strongly believed that our results should be the start of a conversation, not presented as the final word. Throughout my career, I’ve seen one-off research findings treated by media and advocacy organizations as irrefutable proof of a particular viewpoint, but that’s not how scientific research works. My colleagues and I took care to publish a detailed account of our study’s implementation, including an honest discussion of its methodological limitations and political constraints. We called for more studies in more places, all in an effort to contest or refine the limited insights we were able to draw in Nashville. “One experiment is not definitive,” we wrote. “More experiments should be conducted to see whether POINT’s findings generalize to other settings.”

How IES-Funded Research Informs Policy and Practice 

Around the time of the release of our findings, the Obama administration was announcing another investment in the Teacher Incentive Fund, a George W. Bush-era competitive grant program that rewarded teachers who proved effective in raising test scores. We were relieved that our study didn’t prompt the federal government to abandon ship on merit pay; rather, they reviewed our study findings and engaged in meaningful dialogue about how to refine their investments. Ultimately, the Teacher Incentive Fund guidelines linked pay incentives with capacity-building opportunities for teachers—things like professional development and professional learning communities—so that the push to get better was matched by resources to make improvement more likely.  

While we did not have education sector-specific research to support that pairing, it proved a critical piece of the merit pay design puzzle. In 2020, for example, I worked with a pair of colleagues on a meta-analysis of the merit pay literature. We synthesized effect sizes across 37 primary studies, 26 of which were conducted in the United States, finding that the merit pay effect is nearly twice as large when paired with professional development. This is by no means the definitive word, but it’s a significant contribution in the incremental advancement of scientific knowledge about American education. It is putting another piece of the puzzle together and moving the education system forward with ways to improve student opportunity and learning.

That’s the spirit IES encourages—open experimentation, modesty in drawing conclusions, and an eagerness to gather more data. Most importantly, we wanted our findings to spark conversation not just among academic researchers but among educators and policymakers, the people ultimately responsible for designing policy and implementing it in America’s classrooms.

Pushing that public conversation in a productive direction is always challenging. Ideological assumptions are powerful, interest groups are vocal, and even the most nuanced research findings can get flattened in the media retelling. We struggled with all of that in the aftermath of the POINT study, which arrived at a moment of increased federal interest in merit pay and other incentive programs.  Fortunately, the Obama administration listened to rigorous research findings and learned from the research funding arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

This is why the staying power of IES matters. The debates around education policy aren’t going away, and the need for stronger empirical grounding grows alongside the value of education and public investment. The POINT experiment didn’t settle the debate over merit pay, but we did complicate it in productive ways that yielded another critically important finding nearly eight years later. That’s a victory for education science, and a mark of progress for education policy.

Matthew G. Springer is the Robena and Walter E. Hussman, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Education Reform at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education.

This blog was produced by Allen Ruby (Allen.Ruby@ed.gov), Associate Commissioner for Policy and Systems Division, NCER.  

Some of the most consequential COVID-19-related decisions for public education were those that modified how much in-person learning students received during the 2020-2021 school year. As part of an IES-funded research project in collaboration with the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) on COVID’s impact on public education in Virginia, researchers at the University of Virginia (UVA) collected data to determine how much in-person learning students in each grade in each division (what Virginia calls its school districts) were offered over the year. In this guest blog, Erica Sachs, an IES predoctoral fellow at UVA, shares brief insights into this work.

Our Process

COVID-19 has caused uncertainty and disruptions in public education for nearly three years. The purpose of the IES-funded study is to describe how Virginia’s response to COVID-19 may have influenced access to instructional opportunities and equity in student outcomes over multiple time periods. This project is a key source of information for the VDOE and Virginia schools’ recovery efforts. An important first step of this work was to uncover how the decisions divisions made impacted student experiences during the 2020-21 school year. This blog focuses on the processes that were undertaken to identify how much in-person learning students could access.

During 2020-21, students were offered school in three learning modalities: fully remote (no in-person learning), fully in-person (only in-person learning), and hybrid (all students could access some in-person learning). Hybrid learning often occurred when schools split a grade into groups and assigned attendance days to each group. For the purposes of the project, we used the term “attendance rotations” to identify whether and which student group(s) could access in-person school on each day of the week. Each attendance rotation is associated with a learning modality.

Most divisions posted information about learning modality and attendance rotations on their official websites, social media, or board meeting documents. In June and July of 2021, our team painstakingly scoured these sites and collected detailed data on the learning modality and attendance rotations of every grade in every division on every day of the school year. We used these data to create a division-by-grade-by-day dataset.

A More Precise Measure of In-Person Learning

An initial examination of the dataset revealed that the commonly used approach of characterizing student experiences by time in each modality masked potentially important variations in the amount of in-person learning accessible in the hybrid modality. For instance, a division could offer one or four days of in-person learning per week, and both would be considered hybrid. To supplement the modality approach, we created a more precise measure of in-person learning using the existing data on attendance rotations. The new variable counts all in-person learning opportunities across the hybrid and fully in-person modalities, and, therefore, captures the variation obscured in the modality-only approach. To illustrate, when looking only at the time in each modality, just 6.7% of the average student’s school year was in the fully in-person modality. However, using the attendance rotations data revealed that the average student had access to in-person learning for one-third of their school year.

Lessons Learned

One of the biggest lessons I learned working on this project was that we drastically underestimated the scope of the data collection and data management undertaking. I hope that sharing some of the lessons I learned will help others doing similar work.

• Clearly define terminology and keep records of all decisions with examples in a shared file. It will help prevent confusion and resolve disagreements within the team or with partners. Research on COVID-19 in education was relatively new when we started this work. We encountered two terminology-related issues. First, sources used the same term for different concepts, and second, sources used different terms for the same concept. For instance, the VDOE’s definition of the “in-person modality” required four or more days of access to in-person learning weekly, but our team classified four days of access as hybrid because we define “fully in-person modality” as five days of access to in-person learning weekly. Without agreed-upon definitions, people could categorize the same school week under different modalities. Repeated confusion in discussions necessitated a long meeting to hash out definitions, examples, and non-examples of each term and compile them in an organized file.
• Retroactively collecting data from documents can be difficult if divisions have removed information from their web pages. We found several sources especially helpful in our data collection, including the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the internet, to access archived division web pages, school board records, including the agenda, meeting minutes, or presentation materials, and announcements or letters to families via divisions’ Facebook or Twitter accounts.
• To precisely estimate in-person learning across the year, collect data at the division-by-grade-by-day level. Divisions sometimes changed attendance rotations midweek, and the timing of these changes often differed across grades. Consequently, we found that collecting data at the day level was critical to capture all rotation changes and accurately estimate the amount of in-person learning divisions offered students.

What’s Next?

The research brief summarizing our findings can be downloaded from the EdPolicyWorks website. Our team is currently using the in-person learning data as a key measure of division operations during the reopening year to explore how division operations may have varied depending on division characteristics, such as access to high-speed broadband. Additionally, we will leverage the in-person learning metric to examine COVID’s impact on student and teacher outcomes and assess whether trends differed by the amount of in-person learning divisions offered students.

Erica N. Sachs is an MPP/PhD Student, IES Pre-doctoral Fellow, & Graduate Research Assistant at UVA’s EdPolicyWorks.

This blog was produced by Helyn Kim (Helyn.Kim@ed.gov), Program Officer, NCER.

The Department of Education’s (ED) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, administered by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), funds entrepreneurial developers to create the next generation of technology products for students, teachers, and administrators in education and special education. The program, known as ED/IES SBIR, emphasizes an iterative design and development process and pilot research to test the feasibility, usability, and promise of new products to improve outcomes. The program also focuses on planning for commercialization so that the products can reach schools and end-users 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, including more than million students and teachers who used products for remote teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ED/IES SBIR Announces 2022 Awards

IES has made 10 2022 Phase I awards for $250,000*. During these 8 month projects, teams will develop and refine prototypes of new products and test their usability and initial feasibility. All awardees who complete a Phase I project will be eligible to apply for a Phase II award in 2023.

IES has made nine 2022 Phase II awards, which support further research and development of prototypes of education technology products that were developed under 2021 ED/IES SBIR Phase I awards. In these Phase II projects, teams will complete product development and conduct pilot studies in schools to demonstrate the usability and feasibility, fidelity of implementation, and the promise of the products to improve the intended outcomes.

IES also made one Direct to Phase II award to support the research, development, and evaluation of a new education technology product to ready an existing researcher-developed evidence-based intervention for use at scale and to plan for commercialization. The Direct to Phase II project is awarded without a prior Phase I award. All Phase II and the Direct to Phase II awards are for $1,000,000 for two-years. Across all awards, projects address different ages of students and content areas.

The list of all 2022 awards is posted here. This page will be updated with the two additional Phase I awards after the contracts are finalized.

The 2022 ED/IES SBIR awards highlight three trends that continue to emerge in the field of education technology.

Trend 1: Projects Are Employing Advanced Technologies to Personalize Learning and Generate Insights to Inform Tailored Instruction

About two-thirds of the new projects are developing software components that personalize teaching and learning, whether through artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, automated speech recognition, or algorithms. All these projects will include functionalities afforded by modern technology to personalize learning by adjusting content to the level of the individual learner, offer feedback and prompts to scaffold learning as students progress through the systems, and generate real-time actionable information for educators to track and understand student progress and adjust instruction accordingly. For example:

• Charmtech Labs and Literably are fully developing reading assessments that provide feedback to inform instruction.
• Sirius Thinking and studio:Sckaal are developing prototypes to formatively assess early grade school students in reading.
• Sown To Grow and xSEL Labs are fully developing platforms to facilitate student social and emotional assessments and provide insights to educators.
• Future Engineers is fully developing a platform for judges to provide feedback to students who enter STEM and educational challenges and contests.
• Querium and 2Sigma School are developing prototypes to support math and computer science learning respectively.
• ,Soterix is fully developing a smart walking cane and app for children with visual impairments to learn to navigate.
• Alchemie is fully developing a product to provide audio cues to blind or visually impaired students learning science.
• Star Autism Support is developing a prototype to support practitioners and parents of children with autism spectrum disorder.

Trend 2: Projects Focusing on Experiential and Hands-On Learning
Several new projects are combining hardware and software solutions to engage students through pedagogies employing game-based, hands-on, collaborative, or immersive learning:

• Pocketlab is fully developing a matchbox-sized car with a sensor to collect physical science data as middle school students play.
• GaiaXus is developing a prototype sensor used for environmental science field experiments.
• Mind Trust is a developing a virtual reality escape room for biology learning.
• Smart Girls is developing a prototype science game and accompanying real-world hands-on physical activity kits.
• Indelible Learning is developing a prototype online multi-player game about the electoral college.
• Edify is fully developing a school-based program for students to learn about, create, and play music.

Trend 3: Projects to Advance Research to Practice at Scale

Several new awards will advance existing education research-based practices into new technology products that are ready to be delivered at scale:

• INSIGHTS is fully developing a new technology-delivered version to ready an NIH- and IES-supported social and emotional intervention for use at scale.
• xSEL Labs and Charmtech Labs (noted above) are building on prior IES-funded research-based interventions to create scalable products.
• Scrible is developing an online writing platform in partnership with the National Writers Project based on prior Department of Education-funded research. 

*Note: Two additional 2022 Phase I awards are forthcoming in 2022. The contracts for these awards are delayed due to a back-up in the SAM registration process.

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

Edward Metz (Edward.Metz@ed.gov) is the Program Manager of the ED/IES SBIR program.

Michael Leonard (Michael.Leonard@ed.gov) is the Program Analyst of the ED/IES SBIR program.