The Relationship of Special Education Teacher Performance on Observation Instruments With Student Outcomes

Area of Science:

• Special Education
• Educational Psychology
• Teacher Performance Evaluation

Background:

• Effective special education teaching is crucial for student academic success.
• Assessing teacher performance requires reliable and valid observation tools.
• The Recognizing Effective Special Education Teachers (RESET) protocol aims to evaluate explicit instruction.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between special education teachers' performance on the RESET Explicit Instruction observation protocol and student academic growth.
• To determine if specific components of the RESET protocol are more predictive of student outcomes.

Main Methods:

• Teachers provided video-recorded lessons evaluated by trained raters using the RESET protocol.
• Student academic growth was measured using standardized, curriculum-based assessments.
• Data were analyzed using many-faceted Rasch measurement (MFRM), correlation, and multiple regression.

Main Results:

• Overall performance on the RESET protocol did not significantly predict student academic growth beyond initial student performance.
• Performance on an abbreviated RESET protocol, focusing on items with average or higher difficulty, accounted for an additional 4.5% of variance in student growth.

Conclusions:

• The full RESET protocol may not be the most effective measure for predicting student academic growth.
• An abbreviated version of the RESET protocol, targeting specific instructional components, shows promise in evaluating effective special education teaching.
• Further research is needed to refine observation protocols for special education teachers.