This Library is a searchable data base of over 1000 research based articles for providing instructional and behavioral supports to students with disabilities in age-appropriate general education environments. The Library compiles current published research around the topics that make up the NIUSI Systemic Change Framework. Articles around professional effort, school organizational effort and district effort and support focus on student learning and effort within the contest of families and communities. These articles can be easily searched and shared with school personnel.

Simply click on a topic to access a list of articles and abstracts related to that topic, or enter a keyword in the "Search" box to search for more specific content.

Learning Standards

• Ethics in Qualitative Research: Multicultural Feminist Activist Research
  The author explores a self-reflexive effort to engage teachers, administrators, and community leaders in qualitative inquiry within a multicultural feminist framework. In graduate courses emphasizing feminist pedagogy and research in urban settings, students conducted research projects designed to transform existing social inequities in their lived experiences.
• The Normal School and Some of Its Abnormalities: Community Influences on Anti-Racist Multicultural Education Developments
  The author identifies external communities of interest, among other factors, affecting secondary-level anti-racist multicultural education, analyzing schools' representations of their cultural characteristics to different communities of interest for different purposes. He concludes that schools must adopt more principled, explicit, organizational learning strategies in order to gain support for anti-racist multicultural education school improvements from their communities of interest.
• Teaching Mathematics from a Multicultural Perspective
  The author describes principles and instructional strategies for teaching mathematics to culturally diverse students. She explains the fundamental principles of multicultural mathematics; approaches to multicultural mathematics instruction (e.g., portrayal of cultural groups in instructional materials and historical roots of mathematics concepts); and instructional strategies for diverse student(e.g., high expectations, questioning, cooperative learning, and technology use).
• Forging a Knowledge Base on English Language Learners with Special Needs: Theoretical, Population, and Technical Issues
  The authors of this article reported on a conference held by the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt) concerning the topic of English Language Learners (ELLs). The article applies to teachers, families and policy makers interested in issues related to ELL students placed in Special Education.
• Teachers Leading Teachers: Enhancing Multicultural Education through Field-based Partnerships
  The authors argue that partnerships between early childhood teacher preparation programs and public school teachers will strengthen the discourse on multicultural education and its institutionalization. They present strategies for gaining a personal connection to multicultural education ideals, including developing cultural biographies, examining stereotypes and prejudices, examining the construction of a personal identity, and critically examining the media.
• First things first: Demystifying data analysis
  This article applies to all teachers who struggle with which data can be used to improve teaching and learning. In this article, Schmoker points out that in developing data driven practices, teachers need to overcome experts’ tendencies to make the analyses of student achievement data complicated.
• The Care and Education of Young Bilinguals: An Introduction for Professionals
  This book is a comprehensive introduction for all professionals working with bilingual children. For speech therapists, physicians, psychologists, counselors, teachers, special needs personnel, and many others, this book addresses the most important issues at a practical level.
• Collaborative reform and other improbable dreams: The challenges of professional development schools
  This book discusses a 10-year process of teacher education reform at a major public research university (The Ohio State University) and the challenges that ensued. The thirteen Professional Development Schools (PDSs) described are diverse yet they share a focus on school/university collaboration, reform in teacher education, professional development, and inquiry.
• Crafting Multicultural Science Education with Preservice Teachers through Service-learning
  The author explores community service-learning as one way to address the multicultural dimensions of preservice science education. She provides background information on multicultural science education and the use of service learning.
• Teaching Other People's Ideas to Other People's Children: Integrating Messages from Education, Psychology, and Critical Pedagogy
  The authors of this paper discuss that educational endeavors are enriched by diverse forms of knowledge and experience, and, particularly in urban schools,by diverse children and teachers. An important educational task is teaching other people's ideas to other people's children.
• Special Education Programs for Youth with Disabilities in Juvenile Corrections
  Special education services are available to youth with disabilities in many juvenile correctional facilities in the United States. However in recent years, parents and advocates have challenged the adequacy of services in many states.
• Meeting the Needs of English Language Learners
  The authors discuss key questions reflecting research in first/second language acquisition and whole language principles: is curriculum organized around "big" questions?; are students involved in authentic reading and writing?; are students given choices?; is content meaningful?; do students work collaboratively?; do students read, write, speak, and listen during learning?; are students' primary languages and cultures valued?; and do learning activities build self-esteem? .
• Culturally Responsive Literacy Instruction
  This paper is one of the practitioner-oriented briefs produced by the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt). It applies to all teachers of culturally and linguistically diverse students who are interested in improving literacy instructions.
• How Multiple Intelligences Theory Can Guide Teachers' Practices: Ensuring Success for Students with Disabilities
  This OnPoint written by National Institute of Urban School Improvement (NIUSI) explored the intersection between Multiple Intelligence(MI) and special education. MI can be used to improve the learning opportunities for diverse learners, and it has a positive impact on both students with special needs and their teachers.
• Leadership Academies - Module 5, Assessment
  Conducting sound assessments is a necessary part of exemplary teaching. Assessments not only evaluate student learning, they serve to guide subsequent instruction.
• Integrating Lifelong Learning Perspectives
  This report was developed by United Nations Educational,Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It includes forthy-three papers on the topic of promoting lifelong learning.
• Profoundly Multicultural Questions
  The author argues that multicultural education practices in most schools today have not adequately addressed the larger issues of social justice and equal access to educational resources. She discusses four profoundly multicultural questions educators must address: Who's taking calculus? Which classes meet in the basement? Who's teaching the children? How much are children worth? .
• Special Education's Changing Identity: Paradoxes and Dilemmas in Views of Culture and Space
  In this article, Alfredo Artiles identifies "paradoxes and dilemmas" faced by special education researchers and practitioners who are seeking to create socially just education systems in a democratic society that is currently marked by an increasing complexity of difference. He reviews literature on exclusion and overrepresentation in special education, finding lack of dialogue between these discourse communities.
• Multicultural Is Who We Are: Literature as a Reflection of Ourselves
  The author of this article discussed multicultural children's literature, the need for teachers to include multicultural children's literature in their teaching, how teachers can encourage pluralism, and evaluating and selecting multicultural literature titles. The author provided a selection of 17 multicultural books for use in the classroom.
• On PreparingTeachers for the Future
  This practitioner brief is produced by the National Institute of Urban School Improvement (NIUSI) and on teacher education. The author of this paper suggests that as American schools seek to accommodate an increasing range of students, teachers are challenged as never before.
• Embracing Race: Why We Need Race-Conscious Education Policy
  This book examines unsolved issues of race and education, emphasizing four major race-conscious education policies: bilingual education, multicultural curricula, affirmative action, and remedial education. It suggests that such policies are critical to fostering self-determination and personal autonomy in students who would otherwise receive a deficient education.
• The Role and Responsibilities of Teaching Assistants in Inclusive Education: What's Appropriate?
  This study describes a social validation of appropriate roles and responsibilities for teaching assistants (TAs) in inclusive classrooms. A self-report survey was rated by a sample of general education teachers, special education teachers, and TAs employed in urban and rural inclusive programs.
• Determining Appropriate Referrals of English Learners to Special Education: Self Assessment Guide for Principals
  This guide is designed to provide principals and others with a general overview of the issue so that they may review their programs for signs of disproportionality and take appropriate action as needed.
  Download the document here .
• Teaching Social Studies Multiculturally: Implications for Teachers
  The changing demographics in U.S. institutions have contributed to the increasingly multicultural nature of classrooms.
• Minority Representation in Special Education
  The authors investigated the overrepresentation of minority students in special education in the U.S. Racial representation along with regional variations and state poverty rates; correlation between racial representation and state poverty rates; and existence of regional variations in minority representation were discussed by the authors.
• The Academic Achievement of Minority Students: Perspectives, Practices, and Prescriptions
  This book presents a collection of papers by educators and researchers who discuss various methods of improving minority student achievement.
• Addressing diversity in schools: Culturally responsive pedagogy
  This paper is one of the short practitioner-oriented pamphlets produced by the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt). This practitioner brief deals with how to address educational needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students.
• Immigrant Mothers Redefine Access to ESL Classes: Contradiction and Ambivalence
  The author argues that access to English-as-a-Second-Language classes is a complex issue, perhaps more personal and less amenable to solution than previously assumed. Examples are drawn from five individual life-history interviews with 19 non-English-speaking immigrant mothers of school children.
• The Theoretical Foundations of Professional Development in Special Education: Is Sociocultural Theory Enough?
  This authors reviewed sociocultural, multicultural, and critical pedagogical theories and suggests that an adequate and sufficient theoretical framework for professional development in special education must explicitly and directly address issues of power, discrimination, and relative status that underlie dilemmas of practice. They offered vignettes of such dilemmas, with reference to the 1998 Council for Exceptional Children's professional standards.
• The Multicultural Science Framework: Research on Innovative Two-Way Immersion Science Classrooms
  The author of this article reviewed the different approaches to multicultural science teaching that have emerged in the past decade, focusing on the Spanish-English two-way immersion classroom, which meets the needs of Spanish speakers learning English and introduces students to the idea of collaboration across languages and cultures. Two urban two-way immersion classrooms in Texas and New York are described by the author for exemplary practices.
• Recommended Books about Latinos for Children and Adolescents
  The author reviews children's and adolescents' literature on the influence of Latinos in the United States, focusing on books in the following categories: the arts, fiction, literature, simple and interesting, and reference materials.