The Journal of Special Education

This study synthesized the literature on the rates of referral for intervention or assessment of students from three racial groups: Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic. Ten studies, published or unpublished, that presented frequency counts for the population and the referred sample for at least one school district yielded 44 comparisons. For comparisons between African American and Caucasian students, the mean risk ratios comparing the referral rates were significantly different from zero. No significant differences were found between the referral rates of Hispanic students and Caucasian students. Implications, limitations, and directions for future research are presented.

This study investigated whether changing the letter composition of the Denckla and Rudel (1976) RAN task influenced task performance (speed and accuracy) and the RAN-word identification skill relationship in first-grade children. To accomplish this, 383 first-grade children were administered four different RAN tasks in October, and performance on these measures was used to predict word identification skill in April. The various RAN tasks consisted of the Denckla and Rudel RAN letter-naming task and three alternative RAN tasks constructed by making a letter substitution that replaced the letter o within the Denckla and Rudel letter matrix (a, d, o, p, s) with another letter. The three alternative RAN tasks were designed to increase visual confusion (q for o), phonological confusion (v for o), or the combination of visual and phonological confusion (b for o). The results suggest that (a) substituting a letter that was visually similar to other letters within the Denckla and Rudel letter matrix had the greatest influence on RAN speed and accuracy performance, (b) substitutions that increased the phonological similarity of letters in the matrix predicted more unique variance in future word identification skill, (c) RAN accuracy performance as a predictor of future word identification skill provided little unique variance beyond that associated with RAN speed performance, and (d) RAN predicted significant variance in future word identification skill beyond that associated with the autoregressor in children who were at the earliest stages of reading development.

This study investigated the multiyear effects of a school-wide implementation of evidence-based literacy practices and a program to prevent early reading failure in one elementary school. Guided by a collaborative partnership/professional development model, the researchers hypothesized that teachers would implement and sustain their use of a range of new evidence-based practices and that these practices would produced accelerated levels and rates of growth in classroom reading behaviors broadly across students and in curriculum-based measurement (CBM) reading fluency. Results over 3 years indicated the following: (a) teachers did implement new evidence-based practices; (b) use of these practices with kindergarten and first-grade cohorts was associated with larger slopes in silent reading in second grade, a common point in time, compared to an older third-grade cohort not exposed to these strategies and to students at risk and with disabilities, who did not differ in their levels of classroom reading behavior; (c) classroom reading behaviors occurred most often in the presence of peer tutors, reading partners, or teacher-led one-on-one, small-group, or independent instructional arrangements as compared to entire group, teacher-led instruction; (d) growth in reading fluency was substantial overall; however, comparison of cohorts' progress at second grade indicated no differences in CBM fluency growth associated with students' differential histories of exposure to evidence-based practices, whereas differences in growth as a function of level of risk were found. Students at high risk progressed more slowly in attaining reading fluency than did typical students and low-risk students. Implications are discussed.

We explored the perceptions that youth with and without self-reported mental health problems had of their social contexts (family, peer, and school) and the extent to which youth with mental health problems had received special education services in school. We examined data for 4,088 urban youth with self-reported externalizing, internalizing, comorbid, and no mental health problems in early adolescence. With regard to family context, students with comorbid problems reported significantly lower scores for parent attention to misbehavior than students without mental health problems, and students with internalizing problems reported significantly less positive parent—child relations than those with externalizing problems. With regard to peer context, students with externalizing and comorbid problems reported that significantly greater numbers of their friends were involved in risky behavior than did members of the other groups. With regard to school context, students with internalizing and comorbid problems reported feeling more anonymous and less well-liked by peers and teachers than students with externalizing problems. Significantly more internalizers and members of the comorbid group were in special education classes than expected. The majority of the students with self-reported mental health problems received services for learning disabilities.

Instructive feedback involves presenting extra nontarget stimuli in the consequent events of instructional trials and not requesting students to respond to those stimuli during instruction. The purposes of this study were to evaluate whether students (a) would acquire the behaviors for instructive feedback stimuli when those stimuli were presented after trials on any of a set of target behaviors rather than after a given target behavior and (b) acquired instructive feedback behaviors during acquisition of target behaviors or after mastery of those target behaviors. Four 11-year-old boys with mild disabilities participated, instruction occurred in their special education classroom, and a multiple-probe design across sets of behavior was used. Results indicate that the students (a) acquired their target behaviors, (b) acquired a high percentage of the behaviors for instructive feedback stimuli, and (c) generally acquired instructive feedback responses while acquiring target behaviors. The findings are discussed in terms of future research on instructive feedback and implications for practice.