Who We Are

Policy makers are in need of systematic, national, applicable research regarding children with special needs and their families to inform policy and evaluate the outcomes of current initiatives. Despite the need for large national studies to describe the skills of children with disabilities, too few researchers have the skills necessary to take advantage of existing data from national studies and/or to participate on the interdisciplinary teams that design and implement these large-scale studies.

The Carolina Interdisciplinary Large-Scale Policy Research Training aims to address this gap by training pre- and post-doctoral students with a background or interest in children with special needs to use, collect, and interpret results from large-scale, nationally-representative, policy-relevant educational studies. It is a project of the FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, funded by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) at the US Department of Education.

The goals of the project are:

• To increase the competencies of pre- and post-doctoral fellows, to enable them to work on large-scale national assessment or accountability studies, with a focus on children with disabilities
• To provide knowledge about the policy context in which these studies take place
• To develop teaching modules and materials that can be used by other universities

Fellows attend an 8 to 12 week intensive training course at FPG Child Development Institute focused on specific research methodologies and design principles, to prepare them to participate in large-scale research that will inform policy affecting special education and early intervention services. The training is followed by a 9- to 10-month apprenticeship at a research organization conducting a pertinent large-scale study such as Abt Associates, SRI International, or Westat. During the apprenticeship trainees divide their time between conducting their own research and participating in ongoing research activities at the apprenticeship site.

To date, the project has provided training to 5 doctoral and 2 postdoctoral fellows.