Building Self-efficacy in Grade 6 Students Through the 4 P’s of the Science Fair Project

Presentation given at the Georgia Educational Research Association Conference (GERA). In efforts to achieve the dreams and possibilities of special education academic instruction, teaching efforts should be a reflection of complex and interrelated student needs. The presenter will detail a series of single-case design studies that test the efficacy of one intervention on two essential educational needs for students with Autism and Intellectual Disability. These studies examined the effects of text-based listening comprehension strategy instruction through the measure of two concurrent dependent variables: listening comprehension responses to wh- questions and communicative turn-taking during a one-on-one discussion of those texts. The results generalized to communicative turn-taking in the special education classroom discussions. Participants were four high school students with moderate to severe disabilities and communication needs supported by augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Additional data included the target student\u27s views of the intervention, and the classroom staff’s view of the changes observed between baseline and intervention communicative turn-taking by target participants with disabilities. The results yielded a functional relation for the intervention and both dependent variables, which indicated a causal connection between listening comprehension and communicative turn-taking in this case. The presenter will review the unique features of the methods and the implications for future research