Associate Professor Dr. Jessica Toste in the College of Education’s Department of Special Education will lead a training program for doctoral scholars and expand her innovative program of research on methods of intensive intervention for K-12 students with disabilities following two U.S. Department of Education grants. The two grants total nearly $4 million dedicated to making a mark in the field of student intervention. The first of the two grants will support a training program for scholars completing special education Ph.D. programs at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Minnesota. The second will fund a comprehensive investigation of the application of motivational, agentic, and self-theories to interventions for K-12 students with disabilities, the results of which will help better develop highly impactful interventions to benefit a wide range of learners.
The first award, a doctoral training grant, will fund the Leaders in Advancing Data Decisions for Educational Responsiveness (LADDER) program across the two top-ranked institutions—UT Austin and the University of Minnesota. It was provided by the Office of Special Education Programs and totals nearly $2.2 million.
While Dr. Toste will serve as the LADDER Program’s principal investigator and project director, Dr. Christian Doabler, associate professor in COE’s Department of Special Education, will be co-director at UT Austin and Dr. Kristen McMaster will co-direct at the University of Minnesota.
LADDER will aim to address persistent educational inequities among students with disabilities by preparing special education leadership personnel to deliver intensive, individualized intervention supports.
“Students with disabilities have been historically underserved in the K-12 education system and reduced opportunities often lead to heightened risk for a range of negative outcomes in education and beyond,” Dr. Toste said.
Dr. Toste said she intends to use this grant to address implementation gaps in data-based instruction, which has been substantially proven effective in improving outcomes of students with learning disabilities when it is implemented as intended. LADDER will prepare seven doctoral-level scholars for future leadership roles in the field of special education, training teachers and advancing the next generation of research on data-based instruction.
According to Dr. Toste, research has shown teachers struggle to use student assessment data to make instructional decisions and many teacher preparation programs don’t adequately prepare teachers to interpret and use data.
This, Dr. Toste said, contributes to a shortage of qualified special education teachers, especially those equipped to deliver intensive academic interventions.
“Recent data from Texas indicates that the highest number of vacant school positions are in special education,” Dr. Toste said. “Not surprisingly, the availability of high-quality faculty is central to the preparation of qualified special educators.”
Through a second grant, awarded by the Institute of Education Sciences at the National Center for Special Education Research, Dr. Toste will lead a comprehensive investigation on the application of motivational, agentic, and self-theories (MAST) to interventions for K-12 students with disabilities.
The four-year, $1.7 million grant will allow researchers to identify special education interventions that target MAST-driven constructs and determine their effects on K-12 students with disabilities, as well as review intervention practices used to target MAST-driven constructs and examine the theoretical overlap across these practices. Researchers will also work to identify the relative effects of different intervention practices to determine the optimal MAST intervention for serving K-12 students with disabilities.
Working on the project will be Dr. Karrie Shogren, distinguished professor of special education at the University of Kansas and Director of the Kansas University Center on Developmental Disabilities (KUCDD), as co-principal investigator. Additionally, Dr. Tyler Hicks, associate research professor at the University of Kansas and director of quantitative methodology at KUCDD, and Dr. Peng Peng, associate professor in COE’s Department of Special Education, will be co-investigators and lead the analytic approach.
“Educators, policymakers, and scholars agree that these drivers of human behavior are critical to learning. As a field, motivation science has accumulated evidence demonstrating both correlational and causal relations between MAST constructs and a range of educational outcomes,” Dr. Toste said.
According to Dr. Toste, little research has been done as to how these constructs differ, resulting in an entanglement of constructs. For example, some constructs which are different from one another are confused for one another or used interchangeably, while constructs similar to each other are made unnecessarily distinct in the literature. This, she said, can lead to assumptions about what works and why.
Now, Dr. Toste said she hopes this research will meet a need to comprehensively review the plethora of MAST intervention research and build a deeper scientific understanding of the applications of MAST interventions to understand what works, for whom, and under what conditions. “We will integrate everything learned through this work to develop a conceptual framework blueprint to guide ongoing research,” Dr. Toste said. “This will allow for greater consideration of for whom and under what conditions interventions are most effective.”
