Educating Students with Disabilities: 'Inclusion' Environment Benefits -- Now What?
RCEd Commentary
As a consequence of a 2004 change in federal law, children with disabilities are much more often educated with typically-developing children. That policy, usually called inclusion, assumes that students with disabilities will benefit from this environment. Yet that assumption has largely gone untested. A new study shows that, for at least one aspect of language development, children with disabilities do indeed benefit from inclusion—but not in a way profoundly different than other children.
Inclusion policies are often implemented by creating classrooms with a significant proportion of children with disabilities, and then also enrolling typically developing children as well. Laura Justice and her associates (Justice et al, 2014) examined 83 such classrooms, totaling 670 preschool students. About half of the children had an Individualized Instruction Plan (IEP).
The researchers focused on pragmatic language ability; that’s the ability to communicate with peers in social situations: asking permission in the right way at the right time, for example, or engaging in appropriate turn-taking during a conversation. Teachers completed a survey form (evaluated for reliability and validity in other studies) for each participating child in the Fall and Spring.
It was expected that all children would improve in this aspect of language use during the school year. The question was whether the rate of improvement for a given child would vary, depending on the skill of the other members of the class, relative to the child. The absolute level of proficiency of the class was predicted to matter less than the relative difference between the child and the class. That is, a class that scored an average of 85 on the measure might be a boon to a child who scored 65, but not be much help for a child who also scored 85.
The results showed that there was a peer effect: kids got a boost to their pragmatic language from being around kids who were more skilled in that dimension of language. The story was not quite that simple, however, as different children benefited differentially; the peer effect was large (and negative) for a child with disabilities whose peers had weak language ability. The peer effect was smallest for kids without disabilities in class with peers of strong language ability. Note that this doesn’t mean that peer effects are irrelevant for kids without disabilities; it just means the effect is less pronounced for them, as shown in the Figure.
There was also an interaction with ability; the benefit was larger for kids who had lower language proficiency in the Fall, and smaller for kids who were performing better in the Fall. But this effect is relatively modest compared to the overall effect: everyone benefits from being around capable peers.
This may be the first study that has specifically examined peer effects for kids with disabilities. The findings are, however, in line with other peer effects studies. The qualities of student's peers affects their achievement (e.g., Hanushek et al., 2003; Lavy, Paserman & Schlosser, 2012; Lavy, Silva & Weinhardt, 2012; Skibbe et al 2012).
In retrospect, this seems obvious. We can reasonably suppose that capable peers offer useful models, they are more likely to ask helpful questions, and they are more likely to keep the momentum of the class moving forward.
Less obvious is what to do with this information. Every child, whatever their current capabilities, benefits from being around capable children, but we can't surround every child by capable others. Capable peers are yet another limited resource that administrators must allocate, based on some brew of their goals and values.
References
Hanushek, E. A., Kain, J. F., Markman, J. M., & Rivkin, S. G. (2003). Does peer ability affect student achievement?. Journal of applied econometrics, 18(5), 527-544.
Justice, L. M., Logan, J. A., Lin, T. J., & Kaderavek, J. N. (2014). Peer Effects in Early Childhood Education Testing the Assumptions of Special-Education Inclusion. Psychological science, DOI: 10.1177/0956797614538978
Lavy, V., Paserman, M. D., & Schlosser, A. (2012). Inside the Black Box of Ability Peer Effects: Evidence from Variation in the Proportion of Low Achievers in the Classroom*. The Economic Journal, 122(559), 208-237.
Lavy, V., Silva, O., & Weinhardt, F. (2012). The good, the bad, and the average: evidence on ability peer effects in schools. Journal of Labor Economics, 30(2), 367-414.
Skibbe, L. E., Phillips, B. M., Day, S. L., Brophy-Herb, H. E., & Connor, C. M. (2012). Children's early literacy growth in relation to classmates' self-regulation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(3), 541.