Dr. Manley receives IES grant to develop measure to evaluate special education teachers’ working conditions
The purpose of this project is to develop the Revealing Special Educators’ Conditions for Teaching (ReSpECT) measure to evaluate special education teachers’ working conditions. Working conditions include teachers’ job demands as well as the available social, informational, and logistical resources to meet those demands. Working conditions are a crucial lever by which leaders may be able to improve teacher effectiveness, retention, and well-being and, as such, there is increased interest in researching and improving them. However, research on working conditions and practical efforts to improve them require well-validated measures, of which there are few. Therefore, the goal of this project is to develop a valid self-report measure of special education teacher working conditions that could be used for research purposes (such as evaluating how working conditions relate to teacher outcomes and how interventions affect working conditions) and for school and district leaders to identify strengths and weaknesses in how special education teachers are supported, which can inform how they allocate resources.
