New research digs into whether the methods used to teach students with disabilities are effective and inclusive for all students. The researchers offer some of the first findings on differentiating the effectiveness of instruction for students with and without disabilities.

Their study suggests that to help schools make decisions that are best for student outcomes, policymakers may want to consider teacher quality measures that look separately at students with and without disabilities.

Published in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, this research presents a major breakthrough in understanding how to best measure achievement for both groups of students.

“Most students with disabilities spend most of their school day in general education classrooms, but many teachers indicate they receive insufficient training and preparedness to educate these students,” says study author Scott Imberman, professor in the economics department in the College of Social Science and the College of Education at Michigan State University.

“We thought that through the use of statistical measures of teacher quality, we could identify which teachers are more effective teachers with these students and how much general education teachers’ ability to instruct these students varies.”

It’s important that students with disabilities have access to high-quality teachers, and not all teachers receive the necessary training and skills to support them. They also can struggle more with certain subjects, such as math.

Student success outcomes are also often determined by how the entire class performs rather than how individual students perform.

When it comes to evaluating the success of all students, numerical measures known as value-added measures, or VAM, are typically used. However, these measures often do not distinguish between evaluating students with and without disabilities.

Read the full article about students with disabilities by Jack Harrison at Futurity.