Supporting students with special educational needs and disabilities
How can adults make research-informed decisions about targeted interventions for students?
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Students with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) have worse educational outcomes than their peers, and the gap is continuing to increase. These students can benefit from universal best practices for teaching – high quality teaching strategies such as providing step-by-step instructions. But most require targeted interventions that include short-term, focused teaching approaches delivered in small groups or one-on-one settings.
What are targeted interventions?
Schools use many different targeted interventions, such as Lego Therapy, Colourful Semantics, and Catch Up Literacy/ Numeracy. However, a recent study found that 67% of 138 different interventions used across 10 Welsh schools had no published research evidence to support them. Although we can assume that targeted interventions improve educational outcomes for students with SEND, it is unclear which ones make a difference, how rigorous the research is, and for which groups of children more research is needed. Teachers have no way of knowing which interventions work best.
“Teachers have no way of knowing which interventions work best.”
Studies have assessed the impact of specific targeted interventions, asking, for example, does Lego Therapy work? Or they have focused on determining whether interventions work for specific groups, such as students with dyslexia. It is unclear whether certain interventions might improve certain educational outcomes or benefit more than one group of students with SEND. Moreover, many teachers have difficulty accessing research evidence, so they are unable to make research-informed decisions about which interventions to use with their students.
My colleagues and I wanted to address these issues. We reviewed the current research on targeted interventions, and interviewed practitioners to examine barriers to and best practices for implementation. This culminated in the co-production of a new, searchable database, called MetaSENse, to help educators and parents make better-informed decisions about targeted interventions.
What impact do targeted interventions have?
We identified 467 studies that evaluated the impact on reading, writing, maths, science, or general attainment of a targeted intervention for 4- to 25-year-old students with SEND. Examining these studies, we found that targeted interventions improved outcomes in students with SEND by 5 months, on average, relative to control-group students who did not receive the interventions.
Not all interventions are equally successful. Furthermore, the style of delivery – one-on-one versus small-group or whole-classroom – did not affect the outcome. Nor did it matter whether the intervention was delivered by a specialist or a classroom teacher. In other words, an intervention delivered by a specialist in a one-on-one setting will not necessarily have a greater impact than an intervention delivered by a teacher in small groups in the classroom. And not all interventions produce positive educational outcomes for all groups with SEND.
“Not all interventions produce positive educational outcomes for all groups with SEND.”
Educators told us that because they have limited time to read research articles, and because they often lack access to such materials, they are not always aware of which targeted interventions are evidence-based. In order to adapt targeted interventions to their students’ needs, they also need to know the key ingredients – or theory of change – of each intervention. This tells them which aspects can be changed and which must remain the same if the intervention is to be effective.
We created a database of all the interventions we reviewed that are accessible to teachers and parents and that include an online manual that is available either free of charge or for a fee. The database lists the contents of each intervention, what it aims to achieve, who would benefit, and what the research evidence tells us about its effectiveness. Educators and caregivers can search for subject-specific interventions geared to a given age range, for specific interventions such as Cogmed, and for certain diagnoses such as autism or ADHD.
The database will be updated in the years to come to reflect the latest research. It currently includes only interventions for which educational outcomes have been measured, and thus very few that seek to improve behaviour or wellbeing. We hope soon to expand our database to include non-academic outcomes as well, because these are also important. Many students with SEND have behavioural difficulties caused by anxiety, a lack of social integration skills, and/or challenges with self-regulation, resulting in disruptive behaviour and concentration difficulties that can impact their learning.
We hope the database will allow parents and teachers to make research-informed decisions about the best interventions for children with SEND. This could help us close the growing attainment gap between students with SEND and their peers, so that every child can thrive in school.
“We hope the database will allow parents and teachers to make research-informed decisions about the best interventions.”
Footnotes
For more information about the MetaSENse study and the full study report, please visit the website
http://www.educationalneuroscience.org.uk/metasense/
The MetaSENse study was funded by the Nuffield Foundation and conducted by researchers at UCL’s Institute of Education: Professor Jo Van Herwegen, Thomas Masterman, Dr Catherine Antalek, Professor Chloë Marshall, Professor Julie Dockrell, and Dr Rebecca Gordon; and by Professor Michael Thomas of the Centre for Educational Neuroscience, Birkbeck, University of London.
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