The Daily Bulletin Archive

The fourth annual Exceptional Education Graduate Research Symposium will showcase research projects by students in the department’s master’s degree programs on Saturday, May 1, from 8:00 a.m. to noon in Bulger Communication Center. The symposium will feature 15 projects presented by 60 exceptional education graduate students. The event is free and open to the public.

Exceptional education faculty members Theresa Janczak, assistant professor; Warren Gleckel, associate professor; and Mark Posluzny, associate professor, coordinate the event. Janczak said most of the research projects focus on interventions designed to remediate deficits in academics, behavior, or social skills. “For example, one presentation will discuss an intervention designed to improve oral reading fluency that can impact understanding of text,” she said.

“Exceptional education classrooms include children with many different kinds of disabilities including autism, learning disabilities, and emotional disorders,” she said. “Not all the interventions are successful, but it’s important to know what doesn’t work, too.” Janczak, Gleckel, and Posluzny teach the two sequential courses in which students develop and complete their research.

The students’ work will be presented in three half-hour sessions, representing the three programs in special education: early childhood, childhood, and adolescence. Each session will offer five presentations, enabling guests to choose topics that interest them. Many of those in attendance will be exceptional education graduate students who will complete their master’s projects next year. “This symposium gives them the opportunity to start thinking about the research they would like to do,” said Janczak.

Kevin Miller, associate professor and chair of the Exceptional Education Department, is very enthusiastic about the symposium. “It’s a great thing,” he said. “The research is at a very high level, and the symposium gives our students a chance to present at a professional conference.”

Jenna Boyce is among the students who will be presenting. “It’s exciting,” she said. “It’s a chance for us to give back to our profession by sharing what we learned through our research.” Boyce’s group researched a literacy intervention technique to improve oral reading fluency, which correlates to reading comprehension. “Students who do not read fluently will have a great deal of difficulty understanding what they read because so much of their mental energy is spent on trying to decode unknown words instead of making sense of what they’ve read,” she explained.

Phyllis Robertson, clinical associate professor of multicultural special education at the University of Texas at Austin, will present the keynote speech. Her address will focus on meeting the diversified needs of all students within a response to intervention framework, including students who are English-language learners. Janczak noted that 86 different languages are spoken by students in the Buffalo Public Schools. “The classroom of the future is already here,” she said, “and it’s very diverse.”