Project Independence: Training Educational Assistants to Work with Students with Disabilities in General Education Settings
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Project Independence (PI) is a 3-year professional learning intervention for Education Assistants (EAs) to learn and deploy evidence based practices (EBPs) that provide support to students with disabilities (SWD) in general education settings. Created in a school division in northwestern Alberta, PI was introduced to address perceived minimal EA preparation, variable student successes, and low levels of SWD independence after high school. Initially the project included strategies for students with autism, but later the scope broadened to include all SWD, modeled on the practice guidelines of the National Clearinghouse on Autism Evidence and Practice (NCAEP). During the first year, a district coach team completed needs assessments, developed a theory-driven implementation plan, and chose AFIRM modules to guide EBP instruction. In Years 2 and 3, PI provided a structured professional development plan for EAs at a participation test site and then expanded to four other sites. Training sessions occurred every six weeks focusing on the use of EBPs, data collection, and collaborative consultation with classroom teachers. Assessment feedback, conversation, and observation of staff practice hint at a greater EA confidence, declining incidents of student behavior, and greater use of inclusive, student focused strategies. Although there were challenges involving time, technology, and data, the project was able to show that targeted PD for EAs could improve outcomes for SWDs and school culture. Results highlight the importance of ongoing training, joint responsibility, and administrative commitment. The project moves forward in Years 4 and 5 by scaling implementation, enhancing communication, and reinforcing the infrastructure for fidelity, data use, and long-term sustainability.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 it