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Understanding Research Related to Children with Disabilities

by Dr. Barbara Smith, Research Analyst
Source: National Dissemination Center for Children With Disabilities
Topics: Special Needs, more...

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 Reviews

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?"

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