A content analysis of the data presented at special education placement team meetings

Conducted two studies to ascertain the kinds of information presented and discussed at special education placement team meetings. Both studies used naturalistic observation methodologies. In study 1 it was demonstrated that teams spend twice as much time discussing academic information as time spent discussing behavioral information. Almost no time was spent discussing physical or medical data. In study 2 we looked at the specific kinds of assessment data presented and discussed. Nearly all of the meetings were devoted primarily to presentation and discussion of classroom data, scores on achievement tests, and scores on intelligence tests.