Understanding Research Related to Children with Disabilities

So you want to use research findings when you make decisions affecting children with disabilities---what's the best practice for educating them, for determining their placement, for training their teachers, for designing the systems that will help them flourish and succeed. So you start searching for research that's relevant to the decisions you have to make. You run across terms like single study, group design, experimental design, literature review, synthesis, and---ahhh! here's a high-falutin' one---meta-analysis. What's the difference between these terms, and how much weight can you put on the conclusions the research authors draw?

• Research 101
  (What makes for good research?)
• Research 102: Adding Up the Evidence (you're here!)
  (How do you combine the findings of multiple research studies?)
• Making Sense of Statistics in Research
  (Don't let stats throw you.)
• Weighing Info for Its Worth
  (Is this research well done?)
• Special Education Research: Where to Start?
  (How to begin finding and applying research.)
• What Works: Can We Say?
  (Where can I find information on evidence-based practices?)
• Research-Based Resources on Specific Disabilities
  (A starting place for research-based information on disabilities.)

Research Reviews

• The literature review.
  "Lit reviews" abound in educational research. Most journal articles reporting research begin here, summing up our knowledge to date on the topic. So how do lit reviews differ from other types of summaries of research?
  www.utoronto.ca/writing/litrev.html
• Lit reviews 2: What they are, why you do 'em, how you do 'em, and tips and tricks.
  http://www.library.cqu.edu.au/tutorials/litreviewpages/index.htm
• A Webtutorial on preparing scholarly reviews of the literature.
  www.gwu.edu/~litrev/
• Basing decisions on the research: Does the new "way" work? Is it worth it?
  Before changing teaching strategies, you want to have enough evidence that the new method will be an improvement.
  http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/319/7211/652?
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• Research reviews and the problem of interpretive bias.
  Even the results of one or two well-done studies aren't enough to make you confident that it's time for a change. Instead, you need to have a body of evidence to support that change. Usually, review articles are a good source of information. These are narrative articles describing an area of research on a particular question. However, authors may have an interpretation bias: Watch out for it.
  http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/326/7404/1453?
  ijkey=c8b957d72ed82ab3af241547b7a3c7a1c9cdd93f&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
• Systematic reviews: Trying to avoid the bias by looking at the whole picture.
  Systematic reviews attempt to avoid bias by covering all studies relevant to a given question, putting those results together, reporting strengths and weaknesses of those studies, and putting together a comprehensive summary.
  
  • How is a systematic review of research created?
    www.jr2.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/painres/download/whatis/Syst-review.pdf
  • More on systematic reviews.
    http://ssrc.tums.ac.ir/SystematicReview/Assets/Pai_NMJI_2004_Systematic_reviews_illustra.pdf
    
  • How to read papers that summarize other papers.
    http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/315/7109/672

Meta-Analyses: The Next Step Up

A meta-analysis goes further than a systematic review. It's a quantitative method that not only culls the results of many studies but also presents an estimate of the effect size. If you want to know more, these resources will help answer the question,"What is a meta-analysis?"