Learning Differences

�� partners with San Francisco schools to get to the bottom of racial disparities in special education

Carrie Spector — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:44:57 +0000

�� partners with San Francisco schools to get to the bottom of racial disparities in special education

Carrie Spector Thu, 09/25/2025 - 13:44

A new �� research initiative is working to identify what’s driving racial disparities in special education referrals. (Photo: iStock)

K-12 | Learning Differences | Race and Equity

GSE Professor Alfredo J. Artiles leads a new research initiative to design changes in a system where Black students are far more likely than all other students to be referred to special education.

September 25, 2025

By Carrie Spector

For decades, educators and researchers have raised concerns about students of color, particularly Black students, being disproportionately enrolled in special education. At San Francisco’s public schools, disparities persist, despite the district’s many efforts to address the problem.

A new �� research initiative is reaching further upstream to find solutions. Led by �� education Professor Alfredo J. Artiles, a team of interdisciplinary researchers from across the country has partnered with leaders at San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and California Education Partners to identify what’s driving the disproportionate enrollment and, based on their findings, design new approaches to change those conditions and create an environment where Black students can thrive.

“Some kids need special education, but when you look at the data on how students in different subgroups are identified with a disability, you see trends that make you question how and for what purposes the tools of disability policy are being used,” said Artiles, the Lee L. Jacks Professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is leading the initiative as part of a research-practice partnership between �� and SFUSD that began in 2009. “There might be racialized patterns that make you wonder if disability identification is being used to push students out. How can we use special education to provide the resources that some kids need, without making it a tool for exclusion? That’s the challenge.”

Here, Artiles talks more about the persistent issue of racial disparities in special education, what makes this new initiative different from previous efforts, and what they’ve found so far.

GSE Professor Alfredo J. Artiles

What has past research shown about disproportionality in special ed?

The first time this was addressed in the research community was in 1968, in an article published in the journal Exceptional Children, and from that point on, there have been debates about this issue.

Disproportionality isn’t just about overidentification — some groups tend to be underidentified for intellectual, learning, and emotional disabilities, and that’s a problem, too. But most of the attention has been on patterns of overidentification.

Two explanations have prevailed over time. One view attributes disparities to poverty – that children who are disadvantaged by high poverty don’t develop the dispositions and skills that prepare them to do well in school, so they struggle. We know that poverty, particularly persistent and intergenerational poverty, has a significant impact on children’s development. But Latinx groups, for instance, tend not to be overidentified for special education at the national level, even though there are high poverty levels in this community. There are Asian American subgroups that experience high poverty levels but do not experience disproportionality in special ed.

An alternative explanation focuses on factors in schools, like teacher bias or a school climate that is less conducive to learning. In other words, it is not clear if these students’ difficulties in school are because of a lack of opportunity or a low-quality education. We have less evidence on the role of these types of institutional and systemic factors in producing disproportionality, and the findings are somewhat mixed.

But nobody is questioning the overrepresentation of Black students, right?

Some researchers do question whether overidentification exists, finding that students of color are underidentified and reporting an absence of racial bias. But scholars have raised a number of conceptual and methodological concerns about these studies.

Another issue is that the federal government started requiring districts to monitor special education placement by race in the late 1990s. If districts report disproportionate levels of identification for distinct groups, they are cited and have to develop and implement plans to address the problem. Federal guidelines to determine disproportionality were also vague. So districts began to game the system by changing the criteria required to determine disproportionality, often resulting in a relatively small group of school districts being designated as disproportionate.

You’re now working with SFUSD, which has documented disparities in special ed in the district and tried for years to address them. What’s different about the approach you’re taking?

For one, we recruited a group of scholars from a variety of disciplines — sociology, learning science, linguistic anthropology, data visualization, digital technology – many different fields in addition to special ed, because we wanted to disrupt the way the issue has traditionally been framed. The district has worked hard over the years to deploy policies and interventions to address the problem, and we wanted to find a new way of understanding it.

We’re focusing our attention on the conditions that exist before a student is identified with a disability. We spent the first year reviewing and analyzing district-wide data on the history of the problem and interventions to address it. We consulted administrators, educators, parents, and community and religious leaders about the problem and alternative solutions.

We’re also prioritizing the design of a system in which Black families are part of ongoing decision-making in the district. Throughout SFUSD’s history of disproportionality, Black parents have provided a lot of input and suggestions. But they’re not experiencing meaningful participation, and many express involvement fatigue, like, ‘Here comes another team of researchers to do focus groups, and then they go away and nothing happens.’ A shared governance model offers a way of participating in a legitimate fashion about investments, priorities, problem-solving, and so on at the district level, where systemwide change happens.

“We found that on average, Black students at the elementary and K-8 schools were five times more likely than all other students to be referred to special education. At 50 of 70 of the schools in the district, Black students were at least three times more likely to be referred, which means the problem isn’t driven by a few schools — it’s a district-wide problem.”

Alfredo J. Artiles

Professor, �� Graduate School of Education

What’s the reason for looking at students’ experience before they’ve been assessed and formally identified with a disability?

Prior research on this problem has looked at identification rates – how many students in various groups are being placed into special education and the predictors of identification. We wanted to examine the precursors of these processes, to see who was getting referred.

The referral decision is a key marker that a student is already on a different trajectory. By the time you get to that point, the system has likely done interventions, provided extra support and accommodations, and you have a high chance of being identified or designated as having a disability. We’re interested in understanding the support systems available and how they’re implemented in general education before an educator decides to refer a child for special education assessment.

What has your research revealed about referrals at the district?

We found that on average, Black students at the elementary and K-8 schools were five times more likely than all other students to be referred to special education. At 50 of 70 of the schools in the district, Black students were at least three times more likely to be referred, which means the problem isn’t driven by a few schools — it’s a district-wide problem.

We calculated a referral risk index by school, so we could identify high- and low-referring school sites. Then we began taking a more in-depth look at both types of schools and asking contextual questions: What do they do when a kid begins to struggle? What are the systems of support? Do kids have access to specialists? Are parents involved? We also have access to school climate data collected by the State of California, so we can see the connection between the sense of belonging and trust in relation to the risks of referral.

What will you do with the information?

Right now we’re mapping the distribution of disproportionality, finding the hot spots with high referral rates and exploring factors shaping disproportionality at the district level as well as in a small set of pilot school sites. We’re also broadening our analysis beyond the schools, looking at ‘ecologies of learning’ — features of neighborhoods that are potential resources for learning and nurturing, like libraries, community centers, advocacy organizations, anything that might offer opportunities for kids to stay engaged. They might have nothing to do with disproportionality, but they might allow us to identify assets that could be brought to a school’s efforts. A geographer and a data visualization specialist are collaborating with us to create visualizations of this information.

The data we’re collecting is incredibly rich, and having tools that show the cultural and spatial dimensions of the problem can help us to see it in a new light. The goal is to design district-wide systems that can be sustained over time, and to create learning environments where educators don’t have to resort to expulsion or pushing students out.

This initiative has been supported by a vision grant from the Spencer Foundation, as well as funding provided through the ��-SFUSD Partnership.

Research Stories

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Alfredo Artiles

Revolutionizing dyslexia screening: Technology to empower teachers

Olivia Peterkin — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 02:23:39 +0000

Revolutionizing dyslexia screening: Technology to empower teachers Olivia Peterkin Thu, 06/12/2025 - 19:23

Brain and Learning Sciences | Impact | Learning Differences

On this episode of School’s In, Associate Professor Jason Yeatman discusses early screening for students with reading challenges.

June 26, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

When it comes to mitigating the effects of dyslexia and other reading challenges in young students, research says that the sooner the difficulty is identified, the better.

In fact, adults can spot certain identifiers of potential challenges even before a child first enters a classroom, according to Jason Yeatman, an associate professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and director of the Brain Development and Education Lab.

“When you’re thinking about screening for dyslexia, what you’re trying to do is tap into these various mechanisms [that] are developing early on,” Yeatman said. “They’re developing before a kid learns to read. So language skills broadly are one factor that contribute to learning to read.”

Once they enter school, children begin developing written language skills on a foundation of spoken language skills, he said. “But [for] kids that are struggling for a variety of reasons with spoken language, it’s going to be harder learning to read.”

Yeatman joins hosts GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope on School’s In as they discuss early screening for students with reading challenges, and how the Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR) uses gamification to deliver fully automated, highly accurate reading assessments. The tool also enables large-scale data collection to help researchers, educators, and now parents understand children’s learning.

“Our goal is to democratize access to high-quality data" on kids’ reading and other skills, said Yeatman, who is ROAR’s program director.

They also discuss how assessment technology can help free teachers up to focus on supporting student learning.

“Technology should be there to support the teacher, and I think assessment is this perfect place,” Yeatman said.

“If you’re running a school district and you have a limited amount of time for professional development with your teachers, I would prefer that you spend that time working on strategies to intervene and improve kids’ reading skills as opposed to ... hammering away on how [to] deliver this assessment in compliance with the technical manual,” he said.

Transcript

Jason Yeatman (00:00):

Technology should be there to support the teacher, and I think assessment is this perfect place.

Denise Pope (00:08):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights in learning. From early education to lifelong development, we dive into trends, innovations and challenges facing learners of all ages. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at ��'s Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success.

Dan Schwartz (00:31):

And I'm Dan Schwartz. I'm the dean of the Graduate School of Education, and the faculty director of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

Denise Pope (00:41):

Together we bring you expert perspectives and conversations to help you stay curious, inspired, and informed.

(00:50):

Hi, Dan.

Dan Schwartz (00:51):

Denise, it's always good to be with you.

Denise Pope (00:54):

How you doing?

Dan Schwartz (00:55):

Well, I'm good. So here's your question of the day. So it seems to me there are certain things with young children that you'd kind of like to know early because it's going to affect their abilities to learn going down the line. So it seems like glasses, do kids need glasses? But I kind of heard all these stories that nobody discovered this kid needs to sit in the front of the room. Is there a history to them sort of finally saying, "Gee, we should measure whether kids can see"?

Denise Pope (01:26):

Yeah, no, I know, a lot of times you don't find out until it's too late. And I know there are things that you want to catch early on because you can do some interventions early on that maybe won't be as effective later. So I think glasses, hearing, yeah.

Dan Schwartz (01:39):

So here's one, reading. So reading's important for everything to keep learning and it's kind of a tough space, because how do you measure reading before they've had a chance to learn to read?

Denise Pope (01:51):

Oh, total catch-22.

Dan Schwartz (01:54):

Yeah. So we have the guest who's going to answer this. So we're really pleased to have Jason Yeatman back. He's a professor in three separate departments at ��. He's very ��. The Graduate School of Education, the Department of Psychology, and he's in Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics in the School of Medicine. Jason is very busy. He's a neuroscientist, but he is the neuroscientist of behavior, of how people behave, and one of his areas is reading. It's an important area. And he developed a new tool called ROAR or the Rapid Online Assessment of Reading. And he's going to explain to us how he manages to measure people acquiring a skill before they've acquired it. So welcome, Jason.

Jason Yeatman (02:40):

Good to be here.

Dan Schwartz (02:42):

Is it the case that we used to measure reading at the end of third grade was the first time that we'd actually do some formal assessment of reading?

Jason Yeatman (02:51):

Yeah, and that's something that's changed a lot now. I think either 42 or 43 states have universal screening legislation. This is legislation that mandates screening all students for dyslexia. So dyslexia, which is a developmental challenge in learning to read. And this universal screening legislation usually requires screening a couple of times a year starting in kindergarten through grades one and two. And then now getting to this grade three you're talking about, that's usually when state testing starts. So the idea is that students are screened for reading difficulties right away and for the underlying factors that are going to predict future reading difficulties. This has been a huge legislative achievement in trying to bring more equity to screening.

Dan Schwartz (03:34):

Can I ask a tangential question for a second?

Jason Yeatman (03:36):

Only if I'm allowed to give a tangential answer.

Dan Schwartz (03:40):

If you follow my tangent, yes. So dyslexia is not a thing, right? Dyslexia just means bottom 5% of readers and then there's different types of dyslexia or are all dyslexias the same thing?

Jason Yeatman (03:53):

Yeah, so dyslexia refers to a challenge learning to read. Amongst people with dyslexia, there are a number of different contributing factors. And so when you're thinking about screening, you said this was a tangential question, but actually wasn't, it's core to your first question.

Denise Pope (04:07):

I know. I think it's totally on topic and very important.

Dan Schwartz (04:09):

Yay, yay.

Jason Yeatman (04:10):

Yeah, so when you're thinking about screening for dyslexia, what you're trying to do is tap into these various mechanisms which are developing early on. They're developing before a kid learns to read. So language skills broadly are one factor that contribute to learning to read. First you establish various aspects of spoken language, and then upon that foundation of spoken language, you start layering on written language. And that's the job of school is to start building up written language on top of your spoken language skills. But kids that are struggling for a variety of reasons with spoken language, it's going to be harder learning to read.

(04:47):

But there's more detailed factors as well. So most well-known one, the one that's written into pretty much all of these policies across all the states that have universal screening is measures of phonological awareness. Phonological awareness refers to your ability to hear that speech is composed of constituent sounds. Take the word cat, which is composed of K-æ-T, I can hear those as separate sounds. And if you aren't able to attend to the sound structure spoken language, then the idea of saying, "Well now, Dan, take K-æ-T, and assign a visual symbol to represent each of these sounds," that would just make no sense to you. So phonological awareness is one of these foundations where you can really see the clear connection, right? As I explained that like, oh yeah, of course, if you can't break down speech into its constituent sounds, then how can you learn to represent these sounds with visual symbols?

Denise Pope (05:41):

Okay, so this is super fascinating. If I have a kid in kindergarten and they don't know how to read yet, you're telling me that you can do some kind of measure that will predict that they're going to have a hard time reading, am I understanding that right? Is that right?

Jason Yeatman (06:01):

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so phonological awareness, this is one thing you can measure. Actually, I have a five-year-old, just turned five-year-old at home, she doesn't know how to read yet. She's still in preschool, one of the wonderful preschools here on campus. And as someone who studies reading, I'm starting to play these games with her of looking at her ability to attend to the sounds in language and looking informally at these different risk factors that I know are going to predict reading development.

Denise Pope (06:27):

Give an example. Do you say, "K-æ-T, what does that mean?" Give an example of how you do this. Maybe not with your own five-year-old, but in real life.

Jason Yeatman (06:36):

No, I'll be reading her a book and ask her if she can tell which words start with the same sound. She doesn't know all the letters, it's not looking at the text. But I can say, "Today three people were on a podcast together, Jason, Denise, and Dan, which of these names starts with the same sound?" The answer is Denise and Dan, they both start with a 'Duh'.

Denise Pope (06:58):

That's so great. I actually would not have thought about that. And if they can't figure that out yet, how do you know they're just not ready to read? How do you know that it's not like a challenge versus they're just not ready? Because I had a kid who didn't start reading until he was kind of end of first grade.

Jason Yeatman (07:17):

Now you're getting into the measurement question. So now we're going from... I'm going to restate your question, you're saying, "Jason, how do you go from you and your daughter hanging out and playing games to something that works for a system, a school system where we want to not just assess Jason's kid and Denise's kid, but we want to universally screen all the kids that are entering all the California kindergarten classrooms?" And that's where you build measures. So within ROAR, Rapid Online Assessment of Reading, we have a phonological awareness measure that looks at your ability to hear the first sounds in words, hear the last sounds in words, segment the middle sounds and words. So kind of different aspects of phonological awareness, your ability to attend to rhymes. So there's a suite of phonological awareness measures. And we've now had tens of thousands of kids around California, but all around the country, now ROAR is used I think in either 29 or 30 states.

Denise Pope (08:10):

Congrats.

Jason Yeatman (08:11):

So that allows us to collect normative data and make sure that the phenomenon I'm talking about isn't just some unique phenomenon to like, the kids that I see around ��, but really reflects typical development across the incredible diversity of learners around the United States. And then based on that, we start running studies of predictive validity. So we have a scientific hypothesis, this work started in the mid-late '80s, like the idea that phonological awareness is a key foundation. So researchers started developing measures to tap into phonological awareness, started running studies to look at how these measures collected before a kid starts school, predict their reading into the future. And now we've built on that and we've built ROAR to this whole automated platform, which rather depending on me as a researcher going and administering measures to each kid, we can have, for example, all the incoming kindergarteners in California log in, take our ROAR measures, and we can come back a year later and measure the reading skills and look at how these measures predict each other.

Dan Schwartz (09:11):

So pause there for a second. So the way we used to do it was it was a one-hour in-person assessment with third graders with an adult in the room administering it. Now I have a kindergartner in front of a computer, how do you make sure they're actually looking at the screen and that they don't drop off out of boredom?

Denise Pope (09:35):

Right, or they're dogging it.

Dan Schwartz (09:37):

Right. So while that's a great challenge, how do you make an assessment that people want to take?

Jason Yeatman (09:42):

Yeah, that's the challenge. This intersection, the part that's fun and fulfilling is this intersection between design and thinking about gameplay and child-centered design and designing technology for kids is a challenge in its own, right? You have to have something that's engaging, that's fun, that's intuitive. But there's also a science to that too, right? ROAR started off as a pandemic project, but since then it's grown where each aspect of ROAR were- for example, have a hypothesis about how an aspect of gameplay is going to improve the fidelity of the data we get by keeping students more engaged. We can run that now as a randomized control trial and experiment where we randomly give different participants different versions of ROAR and we study how it affects the engagement, how it affects the reliability of the measure. These are all aspects-

Dan Schwartz (10:38):

What's the answer?

Jason Yeatman (10:40):

Yes.

Dan Schwartz (10:40):

Yes?

Denise Pope (10:42):

Some kids... This is my hypothesis, the kids who have the fun version are going to stay more engaged than the kids who have the not fun version. Is that a fair hypothesis, Jason?

Jason Yeatman (10:53):

Yeah, and it turns out to be true. So actually I was joking around a little bit, but yeah, no, this is actually a serious study we did. Because as you start gamifying things, you come to decisions about giving people trial by trial feedback. One of the thing about gameplay that's engaging is that you know when things are going well versus not.

Denise Pope (11:12):

The player knows.

Jason Yeatman (11:14):

Yeah, yeah. Exactly, right?

Denise Pope (11:15):

Yeah.

Jason Yeatman (11:15):

So you're getting feedback, that's part of what keeps you engaged in a game, which is different than a normal assessment where, you know Dan, you were talking about delivering in-person assessments, and when you're trained on these as a teacher, you're trained to not give any feedback, to reward the fact that they're listening to you, but not to give any indication. And so we ran a study looking at how trial by trial feedback affects performance and there's different camps of teachers that had worries different ways. So we work with about a half dozen schools that specifically serve children with dyslexia. And in those schools, some of the teachers were worried that getting feedback that they'd gotten answers incorrect could be just emotionally hard for the kids, or that getting feedback that they're getting them correct would allow them to game the system in some way.

(12:05):

So this is why it's really important to actually study this rather than just sticking with an old approach of saying, "Okay, well rather than, there's all these worries that come when you start gamifying things, let's just not do it," right? That's one way we could. We're going into this, it's studying each step, and Denise is correct, adding in trial by trial feedback increases kids' engagement, they provide more useful data, they stay focused longer, and it doesn't lead to any kind of gaming the system. There are going to be some portion of students where you don't know if their low score was because they really were struggling with it or because they weren't putting in their full effort. And that's an issue whether it's delivered one-on-one or through a platform. And it turns out you engage different kids different ways, and in many ways I spend a lot of time developing technology, but I also think technology should be there to support the teacher.

(12:59):

Technology should be there to support the teacher, and I think assessment is this perfect place. You think about, Dan, if you're running a school district and you have a limited amount of time for professional development with your teachers, I would prefer that you spend that time working on strategies to intervene and improve kids' reading skills as opposed to, you know, hammering away on how do you deliver this assessment in compliance with the technical manual. And that's where technology can lift up teachers, right? Through this automated approach where we can study the different aspects, gamify, get a standardized measure, it allows teachers to spend more time doing what teachers want to do, which is teaching.

Dan Schwartz (13:43):

So Denise, when I taught English or language skills, I often thought kids who weren't doing well the problem was motivation.

Denise Pope (13:53):

What grade are you teaching?

Dan Schwartz (13:53):

Seventh, eighth.

Denise Pope (13:54):

Seventh, eighth grade, okay.

Dan Schwartz (13:56):

Yeah, and I've decided that the problem's motivation. So I do a lot of work to try and create the reading activities be more meaningful, more interesting. But I had no way to know that kids were having trouble sounding out letters. I never had kids read aloud in class. I didn't like to do that. Did you have this kind of problem when you taught?

Denise Pope (14:18):

Yeah, I mean, I don't think you should have kids read aloud in class in some sense exactly for that reason, right? Well, I'll tell you here, this is how my husband was taught history. I'm not making this up. Okay? You would come in and you would start with the first person at the front of the row and you would read the first paragraph of the history book, and then the second person would read the second paragraph and the third person would read the third paragraph and he would count ahead to know what paragraph that he was going to read to see if there were any big words or hard words or whatever, and get kind of practice. And if anyone was out of line or whatever, he was totally, totally toast, right? He'd practiced the wrong paragraph. And if you got lost or you didn't know where you were, you had to stand up, you had to stand up for the rest of the class. So it was very much this very scary... Imagine if you had dyslexia-

Dan Schwartz (15:10):

You had to stand up for rest of the class, what theory is that?

Denise Pope (15:14):

This is punishment for not paying attention because, same thing, the teacher did not understand that it was a reading struggle or you didn't want to read out loud or maybe you were embarrassed by an accent or whatever, right? The teacher was just pissed that you messed up the system and you weren't paying attention.

Dan Schwartz (15:34):

Wow.

Denise Pope (15:35):

I know.

Dan Schwartz (15:35):

Sorry. Just the idea that you would've someone stand up so that they're both physically and socially uncomfortable.

Denise Pope (15:41):

Yeah, talk about a total degradation ceremony, right?

Dan Schwartz (15:44):

That's wrong.

Denise Pope (15:46):

But I agree with you. I would never have students read out loud, and I will tell you this, sometimes it's a play, like Romeo and Juliet, where it is actually kind of important to have someone read out loud or to hear it read out loud. And you have to be careful because you don't know what's going on with those kids. You don't know who's going to be comfortable and not comfortable and stumble over words or whatnot. You really don't want to shame kids, particularly when it comes to anything in the classroom, but reading especially. But yeah, I would have no idea. I would think it was motivation too, right? If you have no idea, and by the way, we weren't trained to assess reading skills, were you? I wasn't.

Dan Schwartz (16:25):

No, no.

Denise Pope (16:27):

Never. Never.

Dan Schwartz (16:31):

So Jason, something I've seen about computerized assessments is they can be a lot more precise than teacher's ability to develop instructional interventions, right. And so isn't there a model where the computer does the assessment and then does the treatment as well and the teacher's out of the loop?

Jason Yeatman (16:53):

You know, I think humans learn best from other humans. Social learning is hugely important, and I think we often think about the goal of school of just filling the brain with more things. And it's important, at some level, if you were to tell me that my kid was going to go to a classroom where the teacher was not going to have the ability to teach them, would I want technology to step in? Most certainly, yes. But I'd much rather be in a classroom that's resourced with a teacher that supported the student's needs holistically more than just filling them with more letters.

Dan Schwartz (17:30):

So there's that second grade teacher you never really like, Jason. On the other hand, there's a computer that has Luke Skywalker praising you for getting all the right answers.

Jason Yeatman (17:40):

I think it has a place, but I think I'm still sticking with that we want to empower teachers, empower the compassionate, caring humans to be the lead here. And technology can be a great supplemental resource, right? And I think we often ask the question in the wrong way. We're often asking, "Can AI do this" or "can technology do this?" But we should be asking, "Do we want technology to do this? Do we want AI to step in here?" And I think often the answer, I don't know, when you think about your kids, do you want them just learning exclusively from the computer? No, you want it to be a supplement where for the individualized parts of it, sure that there's an engaging teacher that's working with students on their skills, practice is a great thing to do through an app. If you're just needing more practice to master skill, a teacher can't spend that much individual one-on-one time. Tutoring is a great option, but if financial resources preclude tutoring, great place for technology to support learning. But not to be the place where all the learning's done.

Dan Schwartz (18:40):

Okay.

Denise Pope (18:42):

I agree 100%. I love having this conversation with Dan in the room, Jason, just come with me every time I have this conversation with Dan. I love it.

Dan Schwartz (18:50):

Hey, just to be clear, I think teachers are really important. My point was simpler, which is our diagnoses may be more precise than the available actions to the teacher.

Jason Yeatman (19:00):

Yeah, that is a good question. And what we think about with ROAR, so ROAR has gone from a research tool to a tool working at the scale of systems, and what we like to think about with school districts is how to build an effective multi-tiered system of support. So that's the goal here is that you're catching problems early and you're finding students that just need a little bit more help. And then as some of those students that just need a little more help are getting the help they need, they're fine. And others continually need to be brought to a more intensive directed, sometimes one-on-one, and this is where there is this interplay where technology can thoughtfully fill a lot of these gaps. But it's not the solution on its own, right? It should be integrated with a thoughtful, multi-tiered system of support.

Denise Pope (19:49):

Okay, building on what you just said, I still want to know how you can tell the difference between a kid who's just having a little bit of a slower role to learn how to read, may need a little bit of one-on-one, versus someone who is going to be diagnosed, have an IEP, which is going to get them special support, can you tell that in kindergarten or is that something you have to give to older students?

Jason Yeatman (20:14):

Now that's something you look at over time, right? So back to this idea of a multi-tiered system of supports. First, everyone should have high quality basic instruction. And you should screen kids and some kids are going to be struggling, those need a little additional support. And then there are those that are going to keep struggling on the screen or struggling on all the assessments and yeah, those are the ones that are going to need a different level of support. Is it important to have a diagnosis? That's really a policy question, not a science question. Because what I would say is assessments provide data on who needs support and what. If you have a system that's resourced to provide students the support in the areas they need, the diagnosis itself is not important. However, for a policy standpoint, the diagnosis gives you access, sometimes, in certain scenarios, gives you access to services you wouldn't otherwise have.

Dan Schwartz (21:05):

Let me switch a little bit. So I taught English in middle school and I don't remember ever giving a straight up reading assessment.

Denise Pope (21:13):

I taught it in high school and I never gave it, ever.

Jason Yeatman (21:16):

Let me give you now the two areas, you guys just asked about the two areas that I'm most excited about with ROAR, and it is upper elementary school into middle school and high school. Let's take this Dan teaching middle school, and there's probably a bunch of students... So students come into your class, you probably don't have a lot of information about them, about their foundational skills, you just have students that are struggling across everything. I would be willing to bet that you take that section of your class that's just struggling with everything, third, half of those students, the issue is really that they never mastered foundational reading skills. They're still stumbling through decoding words. They're still struggling to read fluently enough to read large passages, to digest information, to read the instructions on a math test.

(22:01):

And this is what we find, this is through research partnerships with many dozens of middle schools and high schools, we're finding that of the students that are not meeting standards on the state tests, a huge portion of those are also struggling with the foundations of reading. Now, I find this both sad and concerning, but also a place of hope because it's actionable. We know how to teach reading. When we think about how do we teach the middle school student that is not meeting many of the standards, how do we teach all these standards? That's a very complex problem. But how do we teach them to decode words and read fluently? There's an extensive literature on how to do that.

(22:42):

The challenge though, for you, Dan, as the English teacher, I guess not really within the structure of your day, right? So this requires thinking about structuring middle school differently if we're going to start addressing these challenges. Early screening legislation, the ideal is that these challenges all get addressed early and this fact that I'm telling you is no longer a fact, but in the real world we live in, I think that there's a lot of power to thinking about addressing reading challenges at whatever age they are.

Denise Pope (23:14):

I think it's awesome that ROAR works not just for the young kids then, right? You can use it with an eighth grader, you can use it with a 10th grader, you can use it with an adult. The population in prisons and whatever. A lot of people I've heard in the adult correctional institutions are struggling readers as well. I mean, this is a problem that goes well beyond.

Jason Yeatman (23:34):

It's a huge problem. And this is why we've decided to keep ROAR at �� and run it through a research practice partnership model as opposed to spinning off a company. Because there's so many important research questions and also ways to serve underserved populations of society. You brought up one of prison populations, that's an area where assessments are not common, but as they do make it there, they could play a really important role.

(24:02):

The other thing we're working on now, hopefully when this podcast goes live it'll be right around the time of our launch of ROAR at Home, our parent portal. Our goal is to democratize access to high quality data to any parent that wants to learn more information about their kids' reading skills, their kids' math skills. We have math assessments in ROAR as well. We also, back to the example you gave at the beginning, are building a suite of vision assessments. There's a lot of aspects of way your visual system processes information that we can also measure through tasks we've developed, and this will give parents access to score reports in real time. It'll also allow parents and families to contribute to and participate in research.

Denise Pope (24:43):

Okay, I love that there's this idea of ROAR at Home and there's a part of me that's a little bit afraid because we have some really hyper, uber-

Dan Schwartz (24:53):

I can solve it. I can solve it, Denise.

Denise Pope (24:56):

Wait. But I didn't even say the problem yet.

Dan Schwartz (24:59):

Yes. The answer is, Jason, they're not allowed to use the assessment on their kid more than once every two months.

Denise Pope (25:05):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (25:05):

Did I get it right, Denise?

Denise Pope (25:07):

Yeah. There's someone who's going to be like, "Do you read yet? Do you read yet? Let's do it again. Wait. Oh my gosh, now I need all these interventions. We're going to pay all... We're going to workbook you to death. We're going to flashcard you to death." That's my fear. What do you think?

Jason Yeatman (25:20):

I think that we are neither going to prevent nor cause that.

Denise Pope (25:25):

That's like you're going to push that off to policy and economics and all that. Someone else is going to solve that problem.

Jason Yeatman (25:32):

You know, if a parent wants to test their kid 1,000 times and buy every single intervention program, whether or not I'm involved. But no, I mean to Dan's point, we can set up guardrails here. And one of our goals is to provide high quality information, right? And we provide instructional recommendations, we don't provide recommendations for a specific curriculum or a specific product to buy. We provide information on approaches to work with students that have different kinds of challenges. So our hope is really to curate the scientific literature. We're always hoping to do better on this. We're a small team. Unfortunately, we don't have enough people to do as comprehensive a job as we'd like. That's the goal, is to curate the scientific literature in a way that a parent could digest and learn about their child's strengths and weaknesses. Not test them every week, maybe test them a couple of times a year. Quarterly, quarterly is pretty good. Can see growth curves then, you can chart growth over time. Monthly would be okay too.

Denise Pope (26:31):

Oh no, no, no, no, no. There's so many other things little kids need to be doing than sitting and testing. But I love the availability of this for people at home, for schools that aren't using it yet or whatever. We want early intervention for sure. Jason, thank you so much for being here. Some final words?

Jason Yeatman (26:51):

For me as a laboratory scientist, as Dan opened with, I'm a neuroscientist, my career started off really examining details of brain development, intersection between brain development and learning, and I find that being in the real world, doing research in the real world, engaging with the world just makes the core research so much richer as well. We discover things we would not discover living in the confines of the lab by working with diverse populations from around the country, from different school districts across different states.

Denise Pope (27:23):

It's such a huge point, and I love that you kept it at �� instead of spinning it out to a company, which a lot of research people do, so that you can continue to improve, so that you can continue to make it better, so that you can continue to study it. So that is just kudos to you, Jason, and your team. Super, super excited.

(27:42):

Dan Schwartz, looks like you were going to say something. Final words here.

Dan Schwartz (27:45):

So summarizing, I think this is an amazing demonstration of what science and smart design can do.

Denise Pope (27:53):

Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (27:54):

Right? Where you really take what we know about the world and render it in a form that's just so helpful, so useful. It's not guessing all over the place and really, it's very precise. I think this is a testimony to what educational research can do.

Denise Pope (28:10):

Thank you, Jason, for being here, and thank all of you for joining this episode of School's In. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in. I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (28:21):

And I'm D-AN.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Jason Yeatman

�� team builds tool to keep young readers from falling through the cracks

Carrie Spector — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 19:34:00 +0000

�� team builds tool to keep young readers from falling through the cracks

Carrie Spector Thu, 02/13/2025 - 11:34

Jason Yeatman, founder of ROAR, a free, open-access reading assessment now being used in 23 states. (Photo: Ryan Zhang)

K-12 | Language and Literacy | Learning Differences

Associate Professor Jason Yeatman discusses the adoption of the ��-developed Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR) as an approved dyslexia screening tool in the state of California.

February 12, 2025

By Isabel Sacks

Starting next fall, the state of California will mandate universal screening for reading difficulties in kindergarten, first, and second grades. When reading difficulties are identified early, schools can determine what support students need as they progress through their education and they are less likely to fall behind. The new policy approved four reading assessments for districts to use to screen their students: one, conceived and developed at ��.

The Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR), founded by �� Accelerator for Learning Faculty Affiliate Jason Yeatman, is an automated, fully online tool that enables schools to test their entire student body in the time it normally takes them to test one student. The tool, which has been shown to be highly predictive of gold standard reading screeners in validation studies, is free, open-access, and currently being used in hundreds of schools in 23 states. Assessment data is stored securely and separately from identifiers wherever possible, and schools receive interactive score reports in real time to support their instruction. The ROAR research team also creates professional development tools to help teachers interpret and use the test results.

The Accelerator has helped ROAR expand its reach and strengthen its infrastructure by providing engineering and technical support, facilitating and brokering school and district partnerships, and helping refine its scaling approach.

After nearly four years of research and development, and expanding its library of assessments to test a range of skills in reading and language, visual processing, and executive function, ROAR is going to scale, as schools around the state of California and the country clamor to use it. We spoke with Yeatman, who is an associate professor of education, pediatrics, and psychology at ��, about this pivotal moment for the tool.

What need was ROAR designed to fill?

We have a dual mission: there is a service and impact side and then a research side. The high-level mission that really excites me is building more bridges between research and practice, by aligning the questions that researchers are asking to real challenges faced by educators, and then creating a pipeline to bring that cutting-edge research into practice.

Our goal when it comes to schools is to lift the resource constraint for reading assessment, which is typically time consuming and resource intensive. It conventionally involves teachers administering assessments one-on-one to every student in the class, scoring those assessments, and entering those scores into a database so the data can be used for making decisions. Teachers have to spend hours training and schools have to create complex systems for how assessments are done. This means a lot of resources are being spent on professional development and data collection as opposed to what's really important: using the data to help kids. Now, schools can spend 20 minutes to deploy ROAR across the whole district and get automated scores in real time. Teachers immediately see that information and can start using it to make instructional decisions.

Can you talk about ROAR’s journey to achieving this milestone towards scale?

I see this milestone as an exciting opportunity to connect research, practice, and policy. This new policy, to test all young readers in the state, emerged from the advocacy work of the dyslexia community around California; many other states had similar legislation already. I would really like to see more connections between ongoing research, policy, and what’s making it into schools.

When the call for applications came out last summer, there was a window of about eight weeks to submit the application. During that time, that application was my personal focus, with support from the whole ROAR team, because we wanted ROAR to be on the table as an option for schools in our home state. It opened up an incredible opportunity to do the same work we’ve been doing, but at a much larger scale.

As the years go by, a larger goal of mine is to help schools go beyond just complying with existing legislation and work with them to be a part of crafting future policies. These are the partnerships that are most exciting for me, when forward-thinking districts work with researchers to build a more effective system of support – maybe we’ll look up in five years and have a new policy that is crafted by these learnings.

How have your partnerships with schools impacted the development of ROAR?

We are a team of cognitive neuroscientists that are studying the variety of interacting factors that lead to challenges with reading, and we're trying to gain a more detailed understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to reading development. Sometimes we come in with our own hypotheses and look for schools that might be interested in exploring them with us, but we also try to bring schools into the collaborative co-design of our research questions.

Our current research is the synthesis of many ideas and challenges that schools are facing, where they want better answers to their pressing challenges. As a concrete example, a big focus right now is understanding best practices for supporting multilingual learners. This is a question that teachers face and that school administrators face, depending on the educational context in the school. This has really propelled ROAR toward developing and validating assessments across multiple languages. I'm thinking with the schools about how to best combine the data from these various measures to support their teachers.

How has ROAR helped us do better research?

ROAR allows us to do research at a previously unprecedented scale and make sure that we're doing research that reflects the true diversity of learners around the United States. Now, when my lab poses a research question, we can make sure that our study is not just a convenience sample of students in Palo Alto, but really reflects the diversity of students around the country, teachers around the country, and the diversity of experiences that students are having.

ROAR is also supporting research beyond our lab. For instance, ROAR has been used by researchers at other universities that study brain development and reading, to collect assessment data before participants come into the lab. It’s also been used by international researchers that are interested in comparing reading development across languages and instructional contexts.

What do you hope ROAR’s impact will be?

It’s a dance between scale and impact, and over what timeline. For me, research is the best way to have a long-term impact. ROAR isn’t just for grades K-2, it was designed and validated for use up to grade 12 to screen for reading challenges. We want districts to not just test kids in K-2 to comply with legislation, but we want them to screen in upper elementary and middle school as well, because we know a lot of students are slipping through the cracks. That’s one way that I hope research will have an impact: making sure that a second grader who was flagged as having serious reading challenges receives extra support, and doesn't become the third grader, fourth grader, or fifth grader who hasn’t had the opportunity to achieve their full potential. While I’d like for ROAR to be on the approved screener list in every state in the country, it goes beyond getting ROAR to the largest number of people to how ROAR can bring a spotlight to this issue and impact the education system more broadly.

What comes next for ROAR?

I see California’s adoption of ROAR as ushering in a sea change in how the school system bridges research and practice, and an opportunity to improve equity and efficiency of screening for all the children of California. We’re offering a different model for districts, that’s not just purchasing a product from a company, but an opportunity to align their practices to research and be a part of steering future research, which in turn, means being a part of sculpting future products and policies. We also hope that over the next five years, ROAR will contribute to the development of new reading interventions to advance learning for all.

Jason Yeatman is an associate professor in the �� Graduate School of Education, the �� School of Humanities and Sciences, and the �� School of Medicine.

ROAR has received support from �� Impact Labs, the ��-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF), the Klingenstein Foundation, and the Robertson Foundation.

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Learners with disabilities benefit from more complex reading instruction, �� researchers say

Carrie Spector — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 20:20:59 +0000

Learners with disabilities benefit from more complex reading instruction, �� researchers say

Carrie Spector Wed, 01/15/2025 - 12:20

Research shows that students with disabilities such as autism and Down syndrome can learn to read independently through an approach that includes phonics, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. (Photo: iStock)

Language and Literacy | Learning Differences | Teaching

�� education scholars Chris Lemons and Lakshmi Balasubramanian share strategies for helping students with intellectual and developmental disabilities learn to read.

January 16, 2025

By Carrie Spector

Students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) such as autism and Down syndrome are often left behind when it comes to literacy instruction – casualties of the misperception that at best, they could only read by learning to recognize common words by sight. But researchers are finding that students with IDD, like their peers without disabilities, can benefit from a more complex approach, including phonics, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.

“I always get frustrated when I hear teachers say about students with intellectual disability, ‘They’ll never read higher than a second-grade level,’ ” said Chris Lemons, an associate professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE). “In every study I’ve ever done, there are kids who blow us out of the water and master everything we teach them. Truly, the sky is the limit with this population of students.”

Lemons and GSE lecturer Lakshmi Balasubramanian, both former special education teachers whose research focuses on instructional practices and interventions for students with disabilities, shared tips for teaching literacy to IDD learners at a recent professional learning seminar for K-12 educators organized by the GSE. The strategies can also be useful, they noted, for struggling readers who don’t have a disability but still need additional support.

GSE Associate Professor Chris Lemons

‘Science of reading’ for all

Historically, literacy instruction for students with IDD has focused on sight-word recognition, teaching students to identify words at a glance without breaking them down or sounding them out.

This approach, Lemons said, can help students function in the world but limits their ability to learn to read independently – a capacity linked to positive outcomes in school and beyond, including greater independence, employment, and quality of life.

For students across the board, research increasingly supports an instructional approach based on the “science of reading,” which focuses on five key skills: phonemic awareness (the ability to focus on and manipulate the individual sounds that make up words), phonics (the relationship between sounds and letters), fluency (the ability to read quickly and accurately), vocabulary (knowing what words mean and how to use them correctly), and comprehension (the ability to understand and interpret a written text).

Many teachers who otherwise subscribe to the science of reading don’t believe IDD students can learn these skills, Lemons said, or they’re not sure how to adjust their lessons for students who require more intense and tailored support. He co-authored a guide to help educators integrate components of the science of reading into instruction for students with IDD.

For starters, he advises keeping big-picture goals for the student in mind, not just for the year ahead but even for post-secondary life and education. At the same time, educators should set measurable short-term goals for targeted skills, based on a clear picture of the student’s present level of functioning.

Research indicates that the most effective and efficient way for students to learn these skills is through explicit, systematic instruction, Lemons said, and students with IDD are no exception. “Explicit instruction is, basically, not letting students fail,” said Lemons. “It's giving them a clear understanding of what you want them to learn, and providing a lot of guided practice and immediate corrective feedback.”

He recommends an “I do, we do, you do” approach, sometimes referred to as the gradual release of responsibility, where a teacher first demonstrates a task (“I do”), then guides a student through it with prompts and clues (“we do”) before having the student complete the task (“you do”) on their own.

GSE Lecturer Lakshmi Balasubramanian

Learning to adapt

Another step-by-step approach, known as the ADAPT framework, can help teachers tailor general education lessons to address specific learning and behavior needs. The model, detailed in the book Teaching in Inclusive Classrooms, uses the acronym ADAPT to represent each step of the process.

First, ask: What are you requiring the student to do? Then determine: What skills does the student need to complete the task you’ve just identified? Next, analyze the student’s particular strengths and struggles, to identify whether the student has the skills to complete the task or needs an adaptation. Based on that information, propose one or more adaptations in the material, activity, delivery, or content. Can you take advantage of an AI tool to adjust the reading level of material you’re asking the student to use? Would videos or other visuals help to build background knowledge? Can an individually based activity be done in small groups instead?

Finally, test to determine whether the adjustment helped the student carry out the task. “It doesn’t have to be anything fancy,” said Lemons. “You just want to see if the student benefited from the adaptation. If not, you can try the process again with different adaptations.”

Lemons emphasized the importance of increasing students’ access to general-ed curriculum content through any means, even if they’re not able to read a text independently. “We want kids to still engage with the same grade-level content as their peers,” he said. “Just because they’re still working on foundational reading skills, you don’t want them to lose access to content. It’s a balancing act.”

Keeping reading fun

Lemons suggests involving family members for added support, along with service providers such as speech pathologists. “But we caution parents from thinking they need to provide intensive, direct instruction at home,” he said. “We want to keep reading fun. I’ve had a handful of gung-ho parents in some of my studies who think, ‘If we do the reading activities six times a week, my kid will become a better reader.’ And in many of these situations, the student learns to dislike the activity.”

Teachers can also seek out low- or no-cost professional development opportunities, especially through local universities, Lemons said, where they might be able to participate in research studies or audit courses on reading development and instruction. Forming a professional learning community at a school or district is another strategy, where teachers with similar interests dedicate time on a regular basis to come together and discuss books, articles, videos, or course modules to improve their practice.

Most important, said Lemons, is for educators to understand that students with IDD are fully capable of becoming independent readers.

“For this population of learners,” he said, “we can increase their reading skills beyond what we might ever imagine.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Christopher J. Lemons

��-led study links school environment to brain development

Carrie Spector — Sun, 19 May 2024 21:45:29 +0000

��-led study links school environment to brain development

Carrie Spector Sun, 05/19/2024 - 14:45

A new study finds that children who attend higher-performing schools show greater year-by-year advances in brain development, even those coming from a wide range of socioeconomic environments. (Photo: Allison Shelley for EDUimages)

Brain and Learning Sciences | Child Development | Learning Differences

Researchers found increased white matter development in children from higher-performing schools.

May 21, 2024

By Rebecca Beyer

For decades, researchers have linked differences in school-age children’s brain development to their out-of-school environment, using indirect socioeconomic factors such as parental income and neighborhood characteristics.

In a new paper, researchers from �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) demonstrate for the first time that, even when controlling for those other factors, there is a direct link between a child’s school environment and the development of their white matter, or the network of nerve fibers that allows different parts of the brain to communicate.

In other words, schools that do better than average at promoting learning are showing greater year-by-year advances in brain development, even for students coming from a wide range of socioeconomic environments.

For their study, the authors, including GSE doctoral candidate Ethan Roy, Professor Bruce McCandliss, and Associate Professor Jason Yeatman, leveraged data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States, and the �� Education Data Archive (SEDA), a national database of academic performance developed by the Educational Opportunity Project at �� University.

Their findings show that children who attend higher-performing schools have accelerated white matter development, including in an area of the brain closely associated with reading skills.

Roy said the results, published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience on April 26, were “striking.”

“What jumped off the page for us is that, even when controlling for things like parental income, parental education, neighborhood context, and household conflict levels, we were still able to observe a significant relationship between the school environment of an individual and growth properties of their brain,” he said.

Filling a gap in learning science research

Yeatman, who along with McCandliss serves as an advisor to Roy, said the study is the first to show how variation in the educational opportunities afforded to children is related to brain development.

“Essentially, two children from similar families who are born on two sides of a school boundary have measurable differences in how their brains wire together,” said Yeatman, who holds a joint faculty appointment at the GSE and �� Medicine, is a faculty affiliate of the �� Accelerator for Learning, and directs the Brain Development & Education Lab and Rapid Online Assessment of Reading.

The study looked at fractional anisotropy, a measure of how water moves through brain tissue and an indication of how insulated, or myelinated, a neuron’s axons are (higher myelination increases the speed of transmission between neurons and is associated with improved learning). The observational results show that fractional anisotropy is directly linked to a school’s national grade equivalence score, or a measure of how third graders from that school perform compared with the national average.

The paper fills a gap in learning science research. Although past studies have linked socioeconomic status to white matter development, they have not been able to focus in on specific attributes of a child’s development, such as the school they attend. Other research — including from Yeatman’s lab — has shown that educational interventions can lead to changes in white matter, but those have been relatively small-scale studies with participants who are not representative of the broader population.

“This is one of the first cases where we can measure the thing we actually care about at the population level,” Yeatman said.

The authors also trained a deep learning model to conduct a global analysis of white matter, finding that children who attend schools with higher SEDA scores had brains that appeared developmentally “more mature” than their chronological age.

A measurable impact

The implications are “potentially game-changing,” said McCandliss, who directs the �� Educational Neuroscience Initiative (SENSI) and is a faculty affiliate of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

“National discussions of the importance of elementary school quality have never before been framed in terms of having a measurable impact on physical brain development of our young children,” he said. “I think this changes the frame of the discussion and decision-making around the impact of inequity.”

The study was only possible because of the comprehensive data included in the ABCD Study and SEDA, the researchers said. McCandliss, an investigator in the ABCD Study, first approached the ABCD team leaders about linking the SEDA data with the ABCD data in 2018, and his SENSI team spent about two years creating the resulting “crosswalk.”

McCandliss called the ABCD study a “dream come true,” and the linked data a way to “finally” answer “elusive questions about how inequities in educational opportunities may actually be changing the course of physical and functional brain development during the vulnerable elementary school years across the nation.”

To analyze the brain white matter from the MRI data included in the ABCD study, the authors used pyAFQ, an open-source software developed by Yeatman’s lab. “It was a really fruitful collaboration across both labs,” Roy said.

The authors hope their methods and the newly linked ABCD and SEDA data, which is now freely available to a community of registered researchers around the world, will allow other scholars to pursue their own ideas and hypotheses at the intersection of education and neuroscience.

Yeatman said the methods and data used in the study will allow researchers to be more precise about environmental factors linked to brain development and the mechanisms behind those connections.

“The environment influences brain development,” he said. “That’s obvious. But what about the environment influences brain development? This is the first step in actually unraveling that specificity.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Bruce McCandliss , Jason Yeatman

Program trains aides to support inclusive classrooms

Carrie Spector — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 20:09:12 +0000

Program trains aides to support inclusive classrooms

Carrie Spector Thu, 12/07/2023 - 12:09

Jonny Hernandez, a paraeducator at Abram Agnew Elementary School, with GSE Associate Professor Chris Lemons and �� researcher Lakshmi Balasubramian. (Photo: Lisa Chung)

K-12 | Learning Differences | Research and Practice

A collaboration between the GSE and the Santa Clara Unified School District gives paraeducators the tools they need to be effective.

December 6, 2023

By Lisa Chung

At a meeting before the start of the school year at Abram Agnew Elementary School in San Jose, special education aides shared the strategies they planned to use to boost their effectiveness. One of Maria Ochoa’s goals was to initiate regular communication with classroom teachers.

“I want to make sure we’re on the same page, and I’m going to be keeping notes about our work with students,” she said.

In August, Ochoa, along with 15 other aides or paraeducators, completed their final session of Para Pro Academy, a collaboration between �� University’s Graduate School of Education and the Santa Clara Unified School District, where they learned techniques and strategies for a role that Associate Professor of Education Chris Lemons describes as an underutilized and important link to student success.

“The reason we are targeting paraeducators in this work is because they are some of the most critical staff in schools – they are where the rubber meets the road for improving outcomes for learners with disabilities,” Lemons said. “Schools infrequently devote sufficient professional development or coaching to this group.”

Unlike teachers, paraeducators are not required to have teaching credentials or even bachelor’s degrees, and they often receive little, if any, training on the job. And teachers, including those trained to provide special education services, often don’t receive guidance for working with paraeducators. The vision for Para Pro Academy is to empower paraeducators and facilitate their work with teachers to improve student learning.

The project is the first initiative in a research-practice learning partnership between �� and Santa Clara Unified District that will enable both �� faculty and educators to try ideas in real classrooms, improve on the ones that work, and then share them more widely.

Graduate School of Education Professor Elizabeth Kozleski, the faculty co-director of the Learning Differences Initiative at the �� Accelerator for Learning, said the partnership was designed to create a cycle of frequent communication and mutual learning.

“A community of practice is where everyone is asking the questions,” she said. Through their interactions, everyone can be curious and ask, in different ways, “How does learning happen?”

Seed funds from the �� Office of Community Engagement made it possible for paraeducators to attend the training sessions and receive coaching and educational materials, which will be available in the school’s library for use by other classroom aides.

The shift toward inclusive classrooms

Federal law has mandated since 1975 that students with disabilities be educated alongside their nondisabled peers to the extent possible. But for many years, in California and across the country, special education meant separate classrooms, separate teachers, and even separate sites. As the move toward providing special ed services within inclusive classrooms gains momentum, paraeducators are key to supporting the students who in years past might have been placed in separate classes, Kozleski said.

At Agnew, where students with learning issues in 13 recognized disability categories learn side by side with other students, Principal Joe Young said the training program helped the school’s paraeducators focus on what they wanted to accomplish with their students – and with their own professional development.

“Clearly identifying goals during the Para Pro Academy has really supported their intentional efforts to improve their practice,” he said. The program has elevated the profile of paraeducators within the school as part of the team contributing to student learning, he said, and “it has really given them a greater sense of their impact.”

Reflecting on the first few months of the school year, Ochoa said that progress can be hard to measure with individual students because she changes classrooms regularly, working with students across the district. Detailed note-taking and close collaboration with teachers and other paraeducators have helped. “Luckily, my team keeps very open communication about the students we work with, so if we find techniques that work well for the student’s progress, we try to maintain that progress when we rotate working with the same students.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Christopher J. Lemons

Online therapy for autism

Carrie Spector — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 18:26:11 +0000

Online therapy for autism

Carrie Spector Wed, 08/03/2022 - 11:26

Image: hydra viridis / Shutterstock

K-12 | Learning Differences | Social and Emotional Learning

Grace Gengoux, director of the Autism Intervention Clinic at ��, shares an effective approach to therapy for children with autism.

August 3, 2022

The right motivation can increase the likelihood of completing a difficult task – something that’s even more important for children with autism, says �� psychologist Grace Gengoux. But it’s not always easy to tap into something that motivates an autistic child who struggles with social interaction to communicate and engage with others.

Gengoux, a clinical professor and director of the Autism Intervention Clinic at ��, works with pivotal response therapy (PRT), a type of treatment that follows the child’s lead in finding the motivation to communicate and interact. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced her and her team to take their program online, they found unexpected benefits in this new way of delivering treatment.

On this episode of School’s In, Gengoux joins �� Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to talk about what characterizes a person with autism, evidence-based practices to motivate this population of children to interact socially, and the advantages her team discovered when they brought their program online.

Before the pandemic, the Autism Intervention Clinic provided two types of direct service: a classroom-based program for young kids, with a therapist administering direct treatment; and parent training sessions at the clinic, to help parents learn how to deliver PRT on their own at home.

When COVID-19 hit, Gengoux was surprised by some of the benefits of moving the program online – including access to a practically unlimited library of digital props to align with a child’s particular interests, as well as the ability to create a virtual environment online, a more appealing space for the child to learn complex social communication skills.

“These are the core skills that children with autism need to practice – but using their interests, which are at our fingertips when we’re online.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

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�� program equips paraeducators to work more effectively with students

Carrie Spector — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 18:18:44 +0000

�� program equips paraeducators to work more effectively with students

Carrie Spector Fri, 07/22/2022 - 11:18

Paraeducators support students with the most intensive needs but receive little, if any, training. The Para Pro Academy, launched this summer on the �� campus, is a free professional development program focused on skills for working with students with disabilities, including Down syndrome. (Photo: Ermolaev Alexander / Shutterstock)

Faculty and Programs | K-12 | Learning Differences

The Para Pro Academy at �� prepares classroom staff to support students with disabilities, including Down syndrome.

July 28, 2022

When it comes to navigating learning differences in a classroom, paraeducators provide vital support for teachers by working one-on-one with students with the most intensive needs. But many receive limited training – if any – for their role, leaving them underprepared for the challenges of working with students with disabilities.

To better equip paraeducators for their work in the classroom, the �� Down Syndrome Research Center (SDSRC) and the Graduate School of Education (GSE) recently launched the Para Pro Academy, a free professional development program focused on skills to support students with disabilities, including Down syndrome.

The GSE, as part of its strategic vision, is expanding research opportunities and piloting new programs in critical areas that are key to improving learning outcomes. Learning differences is one of the flagship initiatives of that work.

“Paraeducators are the most underutilized resource in schools,” said Chris Lemons, an associate professor of special education at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and co-director of the SDSRC. “My team’s research has demonstrated that paraeducators can be incredibly effective in providing academic and behavioral supports when they receive high-quality professional development and ongoing coaching, and we wanted to explore whether we could provide that as a service to schools in the Bay Area.”

Eleven paraeducators from Bay Area school districts participated in the inaugural Para Pro Academy, which took place on the �� campus this summer.

Lakshmi Balasubramanian, a lecturer and research associate at the GSE, co-led the academy with Lemons. Jessamy Tang, managing director of the SDSRC, and Anna Markesky, a senior at Palo Alto High School, provided additional support.

Through lectures, group discussions, and problem-solving scenarios, paraeducators learned about the legal parameters that outline their professional role, characteristics of students with Down syndrome, strategies to support academic and behavioral outcomes, and approaches to collaborate effectively with other school staff members.

Each participant also brought in information on a target student, including the Individualized Education Program (IEP), a plan created for students with an identified disability to ensure specialized instruction and related services. During the four-day program, the paraeducators developed a plan outlining the components of the training they would implement this fall, identifying supports needed in their district and data they would collect to determine if they were successful.

Lemons and Balasubramanian will follow up with each individually throughout the year to provide further guidance.

“The feedback from participants was incredibly positive,” said Lemons. “We hope to expand our efforts to provide this type of support going forward.”

To learn more about future professional development opportunities from the SDSRC and the GSE, contact the team at info_sdsrc@stanford.edu.

Chris Lemons, an associate professor at the GSE and co-director of the �� Down Syndrome Research Center, led the inaugural Para Pro Academy at ��. (Photo: David Gonzalez)

Lakshmi Balasubramanian, a lecturer and research associate at the GSE, leads a discussion during the four-day program. (Photo: David Gonzalez)

Photo: David Gonzalez

Photo: David Gonzalez

Photo: David Gonzalez

Photo: David Gonzalez

Photo: David Gonzalez

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Christopher J. Lemons

�� program equips paraeducators to work more effectively with students

Carrie Spector — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 18:18:44 +0000

�� program equips paraeducators to work more effectively with students

Carrie Spector Fri, 07/22/2022 - 11:18

Faculty and Programs | K-12 | Learning Differences

The Para Pro Academy at �� prepares classroom staff to support students with disabilities, including Down syndrome.

July 28, 2022

Eleven paraeducators from Bay Area school districts participated in the inaugural Para Pro Academy, which took place on the �� campus this summer.

Lemons and Balasubramanian will follow up with each individually throughout the year to provide further guidance.

“The feedback from participants was incredibly positive,” said Lemons. “We hope to expand our efforts to provide this type of support going forward.”

To learn more about future professional development opportunities from the SDSRC and the GSE, contact the team at info_sdsrc@stanford.edu.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Christopher J. Lemons

How disability intersects with race

Carrie Spector — Wed, 26 May 2021 19:45:09 +0000

How disability intersects with race

Carrie Spector Wed, 05/26/2021 - 12:45

Illustration: Rudie Strummer / Shutterstock

Learning Differences | Race and Equity | Teaching

Professor Alfredo J. Artiles discusses the complexities in creating inclusive policies for students with disabilities.

May 24, 2021

Almost 50 years after the U.S. Congress required schools to educate students with disabilities in the least restrictive environment feasible, children are still placed in segregated classes, says Alfredo J. Artiles, a professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE). What’s more, sometimes their teachers and principals separate students in the name of inclusion.

In many cases, the result is “bad consequences with good intentions,” he tells GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope on this episode of School’s In.

Across countries, Artiles says, exclusion falls disproportionately on children whose race, social class, religion or immigration status are considered lower-status.

“African American students tend to be placed in more segregated settings for a larger portion of the day than white students with the same diagnosis,” he says. “We need to be attentive to the intersections of disability with those areas.”

Artiles calls for changing the system – not just moving kids from one room to another – and recognizing that “disability is really a fascinating dimension of the human experience,” he says.

“I know how hard it is to produce this kind of change, especially when you throw race and class in the mix. However, we have evidence from certain projects and initiatives around the country in which you see people rallying around the idea of inclusive education and making a difference.”

But, he adds, “This is always unfinished work.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Alfredo Artiles

Learning Differences

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Program trains aides to support inclusive classrooms

Online therapy for autism

������������ program equips paraeducators to work more effectively with students

������������ program equips paraeducators to work more effectively with students

How disability intersects with race

�� partners with San Francisco schools to get to the bottom of racial disparities in special education

�� team builds tool to keep young readers from falling through the cracks

Learners with disabilities benefit from more complex reading instruction, �� researchers say

��-led study links school environment to brain development

�� program equips paraeducators to work more effectively with students

�� program equips paraeducators to work more effectively with students