Visit college.hmco.com/PIC/hardman9eTaking a unique, human approach, this Introduction to Special Education text combines tools for cross-collaboration among professionals in education, psychology, counseling and human services, and allied health.
This introduction provides a context for the other articles included in this volume. The Learning Disabilities Initiative, a multiyear effort at the Office of Special Education Programs, has been focused on a more efficient and effective process for determining specific learning disability eligibility.
Sustainability of effective practices in schools is a critical area for research in any domain. The purpose of this article is to describe and evaluate the validity and reliability of a recently developed research instrument designed to evaluate schools’ capacity to sustain school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS) efforts at the universal tier. The School-Wide Universal Behavior Sustainability Index–School Teams (SUBSIST) was created to assess factors (of the context, implementer practices, and outcomes) that enhance or prevent sustainability of SWPBS. Content of the web-based survey was identified through literature review, and initial validation analyses included ratings of content validity by an expert panel (n = 21) and assessment of internal consistency, test–retest reliability, interrater reliability, and concurrent validity (with SWPBS fidelity of implementation data) through a pilot study (n = 25). Results indicated strong psychometric properties for assessing sustainability. The authors discuss the results in terms of future research in enhancing SWPBS sustainability.
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