History of serving students with special educational needs has started from segregated placements like special schools and facilities outside of mainstream education. During decades, along with disability right movements and more developed pedagogical solutions based on differentiation and individualization, the inclusive placement in mainstream education has been set as a priority for every student. However, smaller teaching groups called as special classes/self-contained classroom are still a valid option in Finland like in elsewhere.

The questions of the effectiveness of special vs. inclusive setting is one of the most actual issues both in the field of inclusive and special education as well as in global education policy (Kauffman et al. 2017). Interestingly, the question of the best placement option has not been scientifically fully solved anywhere; the decisions at the school level are based mainly on pragmatic and ideological grounds. One reason is, that the effects and outcomes (for both students with and without disabilities) are not easy to investigate; there are several challenges related to the research group formation (like sample attrition, baseline equivalence), measures and also to ethical questions (see Gersten et al. 2017; Hienonen et al. 2018).

One of the major challenges is, that for practical and ethical reasons, it is not possible to follow the ‘gold standard’ of randomized controlled trial, where study participants are randomly assigned to inclusive or special education group (Gersten et al. 2017). Instead, many former studies in special education have used natural setting, meaning that the selection to groups has made by administrative grounds and therefore the groups are not necessarily comparable. The typical findings is, that students placed in separate settings, are found to have more severe difficulties, in particular related to the social-emotional behaviour (Lane et al. 2005).

However, in some previous studies, a quasi-experimental design has been used. This means that the similarity of the study groups has been tested afterwards (Zweers et al. 2019) or an artificial experimental/control group matching has been created using available background factors and propensity score matching technique (Hienonen et al. 2021; Kojac et al. 2014).

In our study, we are empirically exploring the outcomes of placement and the actual support offered to students with special educational needs in both inclusive and special educational settings. Our main research question is: What kind of cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes is produced by inclusive vs. special education group placement?

Our ambitious goal is to create a rigorous research design (Gersten et al 2017), which will overcome the challenges presented in the research literature (e.g. Lindsay, 2003). We are focusing in particular to obtain detailed baseline data of the students and their teachers and the learning environments to be able to create matched experimental and control groups using propensity score matching technique. A special attention is paid to study attrition, which is a typical problem in any longitudinal study, but in particular related to at-risk population. Typically the students most at-risk are dropping out of the study. It is also important to notice that the positive bias may affect also to the participation of teaching staff: those who are willing to do some extra work will continue and the others will drop-out of the study (Gersten et al. 2017). Therefore special attention is paid to study fidelity in different schools and classrooms (Bonahon & Wu 2019). The data is drawn from the longitudinal study assessing different aspects of learning in selected schools in different kind of municipalities in Finland. We have utilized official statistics on special education and register of educational institutions (Statistics Finland) for creating relevant national sample. Our research instrument is based on the Finnish learning to learn (LTL) framework. LTL can be defined as cognitive competence and willingness to adopt to novel tasks. The tasks measure general thinking skills (Vainikainen et al. 2015). The data has gathered using online test portal created for the purposes of this research. In the first phase of our 3-year longitudinal study, during the Spring 2022, we received data from 1815 4th graders of which 160 students had a special education needs (SEN) decision (Tier 3). 26 municipalities and 32 schools and 94 classes were participating in the study nationwide. Of students with SEN, 28% studied full-time in regular class, 50 % part-time and 22 % full-time in special class.

This presentation will describe the study design and cover the preliminary results from the first data cycle related to learning outcomes of the students in different placement options. According to the preliminary results there were only few notable differences between the placement options. The general trend related to mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension showed that the SEN students studying full time in general education classes (inclusive option) performed better than the students with SEN students studying partly or fully in special education classes. However, in some sub-scales of reading comprehension also students placed in special school did perform better than students who were studying partly in general education classroom and partly in special education classroom. At this point, we weren’t able to control for the initial differences between students. However, the second data collection takes place in spring 2023. By the time of the presentation, we will take the nested structure of the data into account and control for the initial student-level differences by the means of two-level regression model.

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