VGC wins $3 million grant to establish Center on Instruction in Special Education

Greg Roberts,
Principal Investigator and Director

The Vaughn Gross Center for Reading and Language Arts has been awarded a $3 million, five-year federal grant to establish the Center on Instruction in Special Education, which will aid regions across the nation in bridging the “research-to-practice gap” for students with disabilities.

“There is a lot of quality research out there, but only a small fraction actually gets to the students,” said Vaughn Gross Center researcher and former special education teacher Greg Roberts, who will serve as principal investigator (PI) and director of the new center. “We will target building the knowledge base in effective and efficient ways of delivering instructional services to students with disabilities.”

The new center is one of five “nodes” created in a $6 million U.S. Department of Education grant. The Center on Instruction in Special Education received the largest share of the grant total, Roberts said, because its subject area overlaps the other four — it must work with the other groups to adapt their instruction for students with disabilities.

The other four centers and their PIs are:

The Center on Instruction in Reading, Joe Torgeson, Florida State University.
The Center on Instruction in Science, Karen Laba, RMC Research Corporation.
The Center on Instruction in Math, Russell Gersten, RG Associates.
The Center on Instruction for English Language Learners, David Francis, the University of Houston.

A network of 20 regional centers nationwide will disseminate the information and tools the five main nodes develop. “We will synthesize, summarize, and meta-analyze existing research and use that to create materials for the 20 regional centers to use in training teachers, administrators, and other school personnel,” Roberts said.

The Center on Instruction in Special Education will focus on research and technical assistance with an emphasis on response to intervention (RTI) models — such as the 3-Tier Reading Model — as advocated in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act. The primary functions of the new center will include crafting research syntheses; creating materials for training and professional development; and providing technical support to states in applying scientifically based research, ensuring access to appropriate instruction and content, and identifying students for special education services.

“Central to our work will be identifying students who are in need of additional instructional services and supports and then developing effective ways of organizing and delivering just that,” Roberts said.

The new center will serve educators of students ages 3 to 21 with a wide variety of disabilities (blindness, health impairments, learning disabilities, emotionally disturbed students, etc.), with a particular emphasis on literacy and math at the elementary school and middle school levels. To accommodate the cultural and language diversity present in today’s schools, collaboration with the ELL Center in Houston and the Reading Center at Florida State will be key.

“The proposal for the node system drew upon an integrated model,” Roberts said. “Necessity will make it even more so.”

Roberts said that although the exact staffing of the new center has not yet been determined, planning meetings already are under way between the five primary research nodes.

“We are officially open for business,” he said.

Roberts’ new position will mark his first stint as a PI for a Vaughn Gross Center project, and he will now serve on the Center’s Board of Directors. He will continue in his role as deputy director of the Central Regional Reading First Technical Assistance Center (CRRFTAC).