Date

4-2019

Department

School of Education

Degree

Doctor of Education in Curriculum & Instruction (EdD)

Chair

Michele Barthlow

Keywords

Co-teaching, Collaborative Teaching, Middle Grades, Mathematics, Special Education, Inclusion

Disciplines

Education | Special Education and Teaching

Abstract

To accommodate the presence of special education students in general education classrooms, many schools have implemented collaborative teaching or co-teaching, a model in which two or more teachers share responsibility for a group of students. While myriad research has demonstrated that this model benefits special education students, very little researchers have examined the effect of co-teaching upon the general education student, who often outnumber the special education students. The purpose of this quantitative causal-comparative study was to investigate co-teaching’s impact upon the mathematic achievement of general education students. The independent variable in this study was students’ placement into either a) co-teacher classrooms or b) single teacher classrooms. The dependent variable was students’ scores on the STAR assessment by Renaissance Learning. Students’ scores on a previous administration of the test were covariates in the study. In addition to making the aforementioned comparison, the researcher looked for significant differences between the test scores of cotaught females and cotaught males. The researcher used an ANCOVA to run these analyses and observed no significant difference between the test scores of the treatment and control groups. The results also failed to yield a significant difference between the males and the females. While there was no significant difference among the general education students, the researcher implied that the fact that general education students did not perform at a significantly lower level might actually validate the collaborative teaching model. Future researchers should consider either duplicating this study with a larger, more diverse sample or conduct a similar study that also examines the efficacy with which collaborative teaching is being implemented.

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