The amount of instruction provided by teachers versus the amount of instruction actually received by their students in special education

Abstract

The on-going academic delay of students with emotional and behavioural disorders (EBD) in special education (SE) is concerning. While students with EBD are capable of acquiring fair academic skills, these outcomes are still not being realised on a larger scale. A plausible explanation for these meagre results might lie in a shortage of instruction that students actually receive in class. Since these students benefit from an individual approach, a lack of the latter could be a source of their academic deficit. This study aims to assess the amount of instruction teachers provide to students with EBD in SE, as well as the amount of instructions students actual receive, individually or as part of group/subgroup. In 49 SE classes in the Northern Netherlands, attended by 487 students, the instruction was observed for 30 min per teacher. Descriptive statistics as well as graphs were used to determine the amount of instruction during the lessons observed. The outcomes demonstrate that, overall, students receive a reasonable amount of academic instruction. However, this appears to be distributed unevenly across students and about half of them do not receive any individual instruction. The generally scarce provision of individual instruction may be insufficient for meaningful learning gains.