An Evaluation of Functional, School-Based Therapy Services for Children with Special Needs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Millions of dollars are spent each year on school-based therapy services, yet little is known about whether these services improve the educationally relevant, functional outcomes of children with special needs. This program evaluation study used goal attainment scaling to examine whether 50 children with special needs (ranging in age from 5 to 12 years) attained their therapy goals in the real-world, functional areas of communication, school productivity, or mobility. Sixteen children received speech-language therapy for communication difficulties, 21 received occupational therapy for classroom productivity difficulties, and 13 received physical therapy services for mobility difficulties at school. The service delivery model incorporated direct therapy, monitoring, and collaborative consultation between therapists, teachers, and parents. In addition to goal attainment scaling, standardized measures of functional status were used to examine changes in the function of the children from pretest to posttest and at a five- to six-month follow-up. Measures of parent and teacher satisfaction with the services also were employed. The findings suggest that therapy services targeting communication, productivity, and mobility make a difference in how children with special needs function in the school setting. Children showed statistically and often clinically significant change in their outcomes over the intervention period, with these improved outcomes lasting at the five- to six-month follow-up.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".