Single-Case-Design Research in Special Education: Next-Generation Guidelines and Considerations

Abstract

Single-case design has a long history of use for assessing intervention effectiveness for children with disabilities. Although these designs have been widely employed for more than 50 years, recent years have been especially dynamic in terms of growth in the use of single-case design and application of standards designed to improve the validity and applicability of findings. This growth expanded possibilities and inspired new questions about the contributions this methodology can make to generalizable knowledge about intervention in special education. In this article, we discuss and extend previous standards for studies using single-case designs. We identify new suggestions for internal validity, generality and acceptability, and reporting. We also provide considerations for single-case synthesis and discuss the complexities of assessing accumulating evidence for a given practice.

Teaching Cartesian Product Problem Solving to Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder Using a Conceptual Model-Based Approach

“…One limitation of this work is the sample size, which does not allow the results to be generalized to other subjects with ASD, although the study is deemed to be sufficiently rigorous (Ledford et al, 2018). Another limitation is that the study took place in a context that was unfamiliar to the students and during the summer vacation.…”

Deriving relations at multiple levels of complexity following minimal instruction: A demonstration

“…To mitigate this limitation, we added a fourth participant. Recent commentary on the merits of nonconcurrent multiple-baseline designs (Ledford et al, 2022;Slocum et al, 2022) allow us to suggest that Sophie's data contribute to functional relations confirming the influence of intentional theory-informed direct instruction on generative outcomes. Second, we did not conduct assessments to establish which levels of AARRing participants were capable of before initiating study activities.…”

Empirically Derived Single-Case-Design Effect Size Distributions of Engagement and Challenging Behavior in Early Childhood Research

“…For each design included in the analysis, we coded the identifier, figure number, data series identifier, dependent variable type, design type, whether there was a sufficient number of potential demonstrations and data points, whether baseline conditions allowed for potential demonstration of experimental control, and if so, whether a functional relation existed. In this study, we used visual analysis to determine the presence or absence of a functional relation by evaluating within-and between-condition data patterns using designspecific guidelines proposed by Ledford et al (2022). Specifically, functional relations were identified when consistent, immediate, and therapeutic changes in data patterns occurred concurrently with changes between baseline and intervention conditions.…”