Inclusive Education: What Do We Know and What Do We Still Have to Learn?

In "Uses of Instructional Time in Classrooms Serving Students with and Without Severe Disabilities," Hollowood, Salisbury, Rainforth, & Palombaro (this issue) have produced a research study that investigated a timely topic: inclusive education for students with severe disabilities. It is with great personal interest that I read this article, applauding the authors for addressing empirical questions arising out of policies and practices that often have a philosophical basis only. Applied demonstrations of the behavioral effects of proposed practices can only help consumers of special education research (teachers, administrators, and parents) make better decisions and judgments about services and practices to adopt and use. In developing any new area of research, the initial investigators must take special care to ensure that the readers and consumers of the published research understand the exact conditions under which the effect is obtained, to ensure greater replicability of experimental variables. Investigators also need to explicitly specify the experimental conditions that were not analyzed in the scientific study, under which the same behavioral effect may not occur. Too often the practicing public alters one (or more) of the conditions from a published study, and thereby possibly negates the critical variable(s) responsible for the behavioral effect. The authors clearly stated the boundaries of their findings and the possible limitations of their study, but these limitations are worth revisiting. FINDINGS AND LIMITATIONS What are the findings of this study? The major research question posed was, "Does the presence of a student with severe disabilities in a general education elementary setting affect the level of task engagement in students without disabilities?" For this initial study, the comparison between levels of engagement of students without disabilities in an inclusive class versus students without disabilities who were not in an inclusive class produced no differences between these two conditions. This is certainly an encouraging finding in that the inclusive education in this study had no adverse effect on students who are not disabled. However, the next question is the extent to which these findings generalize (Hersen & Barlow, 1976). What conditions present in the Hollowood et al. investigation might be limiting factors in the generalizability of the results? Let's consider the following factors, which were present in the Hollowood et al. (this issue) study: (1) the number of students in the general class, (2) a general education model that was reported to be one of structure, (3) the presence of an aide to offer individualized instruction and attend to other needs of the student with severe disabilities, and (4) the training and experience of the aide. As an example, the presence of an aide might be critical to attaining the level of engagement found in this study. Concurrently, the absence of an aide in the general class might (highly probable) result in a failure to replicate these results. The reader and consumer of this information must be clear on how "inclusive education" was implemented in this study. Readers of this study should clearly understand the research questions that were addressed, the conditions under which such questions were addressed, and the list of potential limiting factors that related to the generalizability of the results to other applied efforts (Hollowood et. al., 1995). AREAS FOR FUTURE STUDY Although some questions were addressed in this initial investigation, several other important questions, need to be posed and studied. Future studies on inclusive education might address three major areas: (1) learner outcomes, (2) training and qualifications of the aide in inclusive education, and (3) relative costs of the different education delivery systems. Assessing learner outcomes, either through achievement test measures or curriculum-based measures (Tucker, 1985) as a dependent variable - for students both with and without disabilities - is a high priority for future research efforts involving inclusive education. …