A Meta-Analysis of Co-Teaching Research: Where Are the Data?
Title
A Meta-Analysis of Co-Teaching Research: Where Are the Data?
Author
Murawski, W.W., & Swanson, H.L.
Source
Remedial and Special Education, 22(5), 258-267.
Year Published
2001
Background
The importance of educating special education students with their peers in regular education classrooms, to the greatest extent appropriate, was emphasized in law with the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in both 1990 and 1997. Co-teaching or cooperative teaching, as a method for including special education students while providing support for regular education teachers, gained considerable popularity during the 1990s.
Co-teaching can be implemented in a variety of ways. For example, one teacher can act as the primary teacher while another assists. Alternatively, teachers can work with students at different stations in the same room, or two teachers can trade off during a lesson, each presenting different parts of the material. Several components must be in place for an intervention to be considered co-teaching. First, the general education teacher and the special education service provider (either a special education teacher or related service specialist) must be working together in the same classroom. Second, both instructors must participate in lesson or activity planning together. Finally, the class itself must be made up of both students with and without disabilities.
Research Questions
What is the general effectiveness of co-teaching models?
Does the effectiveness of co-teaching vary depending on characteristics of the students studied (e.g., grade level, gender, type or severity of disability) or the dependent measures* of interest (e.g., grades, social outcomes, achievement)?
Findings
This meta-analysis found co-teaching to be moderately effective with strong effects in language arts, moderate effects in math, and negligible effects for social outcomes.
Conclusion/Recommendations
Though the results of this meta-analysis suggest co-teaching can have positive effects, particularly for language arts, the authors Murawski and Swanson recommend more research be done on co-teaching. Only 6 studies contained enough data to be included in this meta-analysis, and of those 6, only 3 included effect sizes related to students with disabilities.
Future Research: More research is needed that:
- Uses experimental control groups to compare co-teaching with other methods;
- Examines outcomes as a function of gender, grade, disability type, severity of disability, and subject matter;
- Synthesizes the qualitative information on co-teaching that has been collected.