Foundational Reading Knowledge of Rural Special Educators of Students with IDD

Rural elementary special education teachers primarily working with students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) may have less training in foundational reading content. We report results of a foundational reading knowledge assessment administered to a national sample of 220 special education teachers working in various locales. On average, teachers answered 67% of items correctly. We conducted subgroup analyses using two approaches for parsing school locales (i.e., postsprawl dichotomous and proximity). Using the postsprawl dichotomous approach, we found that rural teachers (M = 13.13; SD = 2.47) had significantly greater knowledge than non-rural teachers (M = 11.84; SD = 3.17; p = .005). Descriptive item analyses revealed that rural teachers scored higher on several items assessing knowledge of terminology and lower on application items. The omnibus test was significant for the proximity group analysis as well (p = .048), but no pairwise comparisons were significant. We discuss implications for research and practice.