Welcome to SERA!
The Special Education Research Accelerator (SERA) is a platform for conducting crowdsourced studies related to special education.
SERA has developed a validated infrastructure, established procedures, and built an affiliated network of special education researchers who conduct high-quality, large-scale, and open studies with diverse samples. This network actively addresses critical questions in the field, driving forward evidence-based practices and research.
Replication Studies
The SERA infrastructure is built around prospectively designed dataflow and workflows to allow for reproducibility. Our online data portal provides comprehensive access to resources for our research partners.
Research Partnerships
SERA is a platform for conducting crowdsourced studies related to special education, in which data are collected across multiple research sites by multiple research partners.
Project Highlights
Crowdsourcing Approaches to Accelerate the Accumulation of Knowledge in Special Education Research
Presented at the 2024 Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) Conference in Baltimore, MD.
Crowdsource Science: Science Instruction for Students with Learning Disabilities
Crowdsource Science project, a nationally representative observation study funded by the National Science Foundation’s EDU Core Research (ECR) program, aims to illuminate what science instruction looks like for students with learning disabilities, addressing the documented achievement gap and providing insights to better support these learners.
Continue Reading Crowdsource Science: Science Instruction for Students with Learning Disabilities
Study Recap: The SERA Pilot Study (2021-2022)
To pilot our crowdsourcing platform and process, we designed an experiment to test the effects of prompting elementary students with high-incidence disabilities to generate explanations on remembering animal facts. In a previous study, Scruggs and colleagues (1994) found that students who generated their own explanations had significantly greater immediate and delayed recall (after one week) of animal facts compared to a control group that merely repeated the facts. This study involved 36 fourth- and fifth-grade students with high-incidence disabilities in the Ohio River Valley. We replicated this study to determine if we would observe the same effects with a different group of students from across the country.
Continue Reading Study Recap: The SERA Pilot Study (2021-2022)