Special Educators as Single-Subject Researchers

This paper presents some basic guidelines for planning and conducting single-subject research in special education classrooms, and argues that single-subject research procedures are conceptually compatible with special education practices. Teachers seldom implement their own experiments and in general do not recognize the relevance of research to special education. As one contribution toward rectifying this problem, this paper highlights three basic steps for doing single-subject research in applied special education settings: selecting appropriate target behaviors, designing observational assessment procedures, and selecting cost-effective means for data collection that can be conducted by classroom personnel.