Investigating the Effectiveness of Special Education

Abstract

The enormous literature on remedial procedures with mildly handicapped children contains many convincing demonstrations that specific instructional techniques can be effective in accomplishing narrowly defined goals. However, when the focus of evaluation shifts to more complex programs that are designed to achieve a more complete remediation of academic skill deficits, the results have often been discouraging. This Topical Review critically examines previous attempts to evaluate the efficiacy of special education programs for mildly handicapped children. The author suggests that serious methodological flaws in these evaluation efforts make our present knowledge in this area very weak. The final section of the review proposes a methodology that is designed to address and overcome many of the limitations of previous research.—JKT