Evidence-Based Teaching Strategies for Students with EBD.

S tudents with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) struggle in school, perhaps more so than any other group of students. Whereas it is commonly recognized that these children and adolescents have severe social skills deficits, which impede development of meaningful relationships with peers and teachers, it is also true that students with EBD evidence significant academic deficiencies. On average, these students perform 1.2–2 grade levels behind their peers while in elementary school (Trout, Nordness, Pierce, & Epstein, 2003). Unfortunately, this discrepancy only worsens with age, and by the time these students reach high school, they are performing almost 3.5 grade levels below their peers, with less than one third of students with EBD functioning at or above grade level in any academic area (Coutinho, 1986; Epstein, Kinder, & Bursuck, 1989). This is not surprising, given that more than half of students with EBD also may meet one or more of the eligibility criteria for a learning disability (Glassberg, Hooper, & Mattison, 1999). These significant academic deficits have resulted in students with EBD attaining one of the worst graduation rates (32.1%) of students with any disability (U.S. Department of Education, 2006). Given that many students with EBD fail to master basic academic skills that are essential to functioning successfully within the community, this elevated school dropout rate only makes a successful transition to the job market more challenging (Gunter & Denny, 1998). As a result, 4 years after leaving high school, this population experiences a postschool unemployment rate of 52% (D’Amico & Marder, 1991). Despite these dismal academic outcomes, the majority of interventions conducted with these children have focused primarily on behavior modification, often neglecting glaring academic deficiencies (Ryan, Reid, & Epstein, 2004). Recently, however, researchers have begun to place an increased emphasis on addressing the academic deficits of students with EBD to increase their engagement in school, with the hope of improving graduation rates (Mooney, Epstein, Reid, & Nelson, 2003). Given the daunting challenges that teachers of students with EBD face while attempting to address these students’ social and academic deficiencies, it is important they incorporate empirically based teaching methods into their classrooms to maximize their teaching effectiveness. Recently, researchers at the University of Nebraska’s Center for At-Risk Children’s Services (e.g., Epstein, Nelson, Trout, & Mooney, 2005) summarized the intervention literature targeted at improving the academic skills and performance of students with EBD served in public schools. Conclusions from analyses of this small body of literature indicated that positive outcomes were reported across participants, settings, and subject areas (Nelson, Benner, & Mooney, 2008). In general, these researchers divided academic interventions into three primary categories: (a) peer-mediated interventions (e.g., cross-age tutoring, classwide peer tutoring), in which the student’s peers were responsible for providing instruction; (b) selfmediated interventions (e.g., selfmonitoring, self-evaluation), in which the responsibility for implementing an intervention rested with the students themselves; and (c) teachermediated interventions (e.g., story mapping, mnemonics) wherein the teacher provided the academic instruction to the students. The purpose of this manuscript is twofold: (a) to highlight findings of these literature reviews covering over three decades of research conducted with students with EBD; and (b) to provide teachers a condensed summary of teaching strategies that have demonstrated efficacy in educating some of the most challenging students in today’s schools.