Issue No.5 - Faculty of Education - The University of Hong Kong

6
across the K-12 span. There is also initial evidence to support using
the Student Risk Screening Scale in middle (Lane, Parks, Kalberg &
Carter, 2007) and high schools (Lane, Kalberg, Parks, & Carter, in
press).
Moving forward it is important to continue to develop feasible,
effective screening tools that can be used to identify students with
EBD in middle and high schools. Further, the research and teaching
communities need to collaborate to institutionalize screening
practices across the K-12 continuum, with a goal of identifying and
supporting students with and at risk for EBD.
Targeted Supports: Evidence-based Practices
Once identified, it is important to provide evidence-based interventions
to address their academic, social, and behavioral needs. A
range of criteria are currently being used to define “evidence-based
practice.” To be frank, applying such criteria is not straight forward,
often making it less than a simple task to determine if a practice is
indeed evidence-based.
If such interventions have not yet been developed, then it will be
necessary to conduct rigorous evaluations within three-tiered
models to test the effectiveness of promising practices (Robertson
& Lane, 2007; Lane, Harris, Graham, Weisenbach, Brindle & Morphy,
in press). The later can be accomplished by conducing single
case and group design investigations at the secondary level that
adhere to core quality indicators recommended for determining
evidenced-based practices (see Gersten, Fuchs, Compton, Coyne,
Greenwood & Innocenti, 2005; Horner, Carr, Halle, McGee,
Odom & Wolery, 2005). Once such practices are identified, then
the goal is to strike a balance between scientific rigor and feasibility
to ensure that desired practices are not only identified but sustained.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the goal of all intervention work is to identify ethical
methods of obtaining meaningful change that sustains (Baer, Wolf &
Risely, 1968). As I look to the future, I contend that three-tiered
models of support have tremendous potential to prevent the
development of EBD and to better support students with EBD.
Refining the methods used to identify students requiring secondary
supports and then either (a) employing evidence-based practices
and/or (b) testing promising practices that have not yet been
validated, has the likelihood of allowing this population to be better
served in the general education setting. For a more detailed discussion
of these recommendations, I refer the reader to Lane
(2007).
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Authors Note:
I would like to thank Bob Gable and Bev Johns for the opportunity to be
a keynote speaker at IASE’s 10 th Biennial Conference. Also, I would like to
thank my esteemed former student and now colleague, Jemma Robertson
Kalberg, for her contributions to the work presented. Without her
talents and commitment, this work would not have been possible.