We conducted a systematic literature review examining the participant characteristics of studies of students with emotional disturbance (ED) with the purpose of better understanding potential similarities and differences between students with ED in research and the population of students with ED. Results indicate (a) participants with reported…

Autism research tends to exclude racially and ethnically minoritized autistic individuals, limiting the quality of the evidence base for characterizing and diagnosing language impairment in racially and ethnically minoritized autistic individuals. This systematic review examines reporting practices for participant socio-demographics in studies…

The field of school psychology continues to further embrace a social justice perspective to address systemic racism, privilege, prejudice, and discrimination. To accomplish this mission, school psychologists must ensure that there is a solid literature base that is inclusive and representative of students from minoritized backgrounds. A review of…

The purpose of this scoping review is to critically examine empirical research that draws on first-person experiences of schooling among students with autism or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as well as to map whose voices are heard in research and where the current knowledge gaps are. The review examined key characteristics of…

Intervention studies to reduce challenging behavior in young children below the age of 6 were reviewed for participant characteristics, including gender, race/ethnicity, disability, socioeconomic status, and language to evaluate the frequency of reporting and diversity of participant characteristics in this area of research. Interventions…

Given the continued changes in demographic diversity of students in the United States, it is important to ensure that participants included in special education research reflect the diversity of the classroom. We examined 16 years of intervention research across 12 special education journals to evaluate the extent to which diverse student…

The purpose of this study was to describe the coaching that occurred at Head Start (HS) grantees as a result of the Early Learning Mentor Coach (ELMC) initiative. This provided a unique opportunity to describe the different dimensions of coaching within HS settings from the perspective of multiple stakeholders--administrators, coaches, and staff.…

The discussion here covers five articles that are linked in the sense that they all treat population invariance. This discussion of population invariance is a somewhat broader treatment of the subject than simply a discussion of these five articles. In particular, occasional reference is made to publications other than those in this issue. The…

This article discusses the five studies included in this issue. Each article addressed the same topic, population invariance of equating. They all used data from major standardized testing programs, and they all used essentially the same statistics to evaluate their results, namely, the root mean square difference and root expected mean square…

Historically, African Americans have resisted participation in clinical trials and other research projects because of distrust of the mostly white research establishment. Although there are legitimate reasons for refusing to join clinical trials, most notably the abuses of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, African Americans may be passing up…

Research on assessing the cultural fairness of individual test items is reviewed, with emphasis on Birnbaum's three-parameter logistic model. As defined in this review, differential item characteristics are exhibited when examinees from one group have a lower probability of answering correctly than do examinees of equal ability from another group.…