ABSTRACT
Special education involves individualizing interventions tailored to specific strengths, needs, and circumstances of youth who differ from their peers in school functioning. Youth with disabilities often experience difficulties across multiple domains (e.g., academic, behavior, communication, health, life skills, social competence) that conjointly contribute to school adjustment problems and suboptimal adulthood outcomes. Yet education research has predominantly focused on large-scale, cluster-randomized trials aimed at identifying interventions that enhance performance limited to a specific domain for an overall sample or population. Although such work can clarify common practice elements of effective programs, there is a need for research approaches aimed at providing guidance to individualized and adaptive interventions to better address the multifaceted and dynamic factors that affect school adjustment and outcomes of youth with disabilities. Two approaches that can help address this need are person- and process-centered analyses. Person-centered analyses involve analytic techniques (e.g., cluster analysis, latent class/profile analysis, latent trajectory analysis) that identify subtypes of youth who share similar patterns of experiences and adjustment across multiple domains or over time. Process-centered analyses (e.g., mediation analysis) involve techniques to elucidate factors and circumstances that contribute to changes in outcomes of different youth subtypes. In this chapter, we discuss how research and practice in special education can be enhanced by bringing together information from what works (i.e., practice elements) in cluster-randomized trials with findings derived from person- and process-centered approaches to guide the use of student-specific data to facilitate efforts to tailor interventions.
