Characteristics of Meta-Analyses Reported in Mental Retardation, Learning Disabilities, and Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Face Validity of Meta-Analyses in Emotional or Behavioral Disorders

“…Generally, therefore, while providing a great deal of information for judging face validity, the information is incomplete and unevenly reported. This result is similar to findings with metaanalyses in LD (Mostert, 1996) and in a sampling of meta-analytic face validity in LD, E/BD, and MR (Mostert, 2001), as noted in Table 4. Overall mean rank of domain criteria by primary study (see Table 3) reveals the overall proportion of criteria provided across the domains for each study.…”

“…4. How do these results compare with previous work in this area with published metaanalyses in learning disabilities (LD; Mostert, 1996), mental retardation (MR; Mostert, 2003), and a comparative but smaller set of LD, MR, and BD meta-analyses (Mostert, 2001)?…”

“…There are several more-or less-detailed reviews of meta-analytic results in special education (i.e., mega-analyses) whose chief function is to summarize metaanalytic results across different research areas and knowledge domains (e.g., Forness, Kavale, Blum, & Lloyd, 1997;Gresham, 1998;Kavale & Dobbins, 1993;Swanson et al, 1993). Pertinent to this review, mega-analytic overviews of meta-analyses in other special education areas exist in LD (Mostert, 1996), MR (Mostert, 2003), and a comparison of meta-analyses in LD, MR, and E/BD (Mostert, 2001). Combined, these results indicate that (a) very few metaanalyses include all criteria across domains, (b) included criteria vary by study and domain, and (c) there appears to be no clear improvement in what is reported over time.…”

“…As noted elsewhere (Mostert, 1996(Mostert, , 2001(Mostert, , 2003, the population of primary studies inserted into the meta-analysis varies according to search procedures, researcher decisions regarding inclusion of studies, and number of studies generated around a research topic. Data analysis, therefore, revolves around the following:…”

Evaluating Article Search and Selection Procedures in Special Education Literature Reviews

“…This may be due to the expertise needed to perform the requisite statistical procedures. Although beyond the scope of this review, future research should extend previous work regarding the quality of meta-analyses (e.g., Mostert, 2001) and examine meta-analyses involving specific forms of research (e.g., single-case). Further evaluation of the standards of analysis in single-case design, for example, could contribute to debate regarding the statistical interpretation of graphs (e.g., Maggin, Lane, & Pustejovsky, 2017).…”