Season 5, Episode 1 — 28 August 2025

About this episode

Today we begin a five-part series of episodes recognizing the 50th anniversary of Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities (or RPSD). In this first episode of our podcast series Dr. Craig Kennedy, the editor of RPSD, introduces the series, explaining this year-long retrospective examination of four outstanding publications in the history of research on inclusion for people with disabilities and how they impacted the field.

About the presenters

Craig H. Kennedy is a professor of educational psychology and pediatrics at the University of Connecticut. He received his terminal degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara (Education), master’s degree from the University of Oregon (Special Education), and bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara (Experimental Psychology). He spent much of his academic career at Vanderbilt University where he was a professor of special education and pediatrics and served as Department Chair and Senior Associate Dean. He has also served as Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of Connecticut and Dean of Education at the University of Georgia.

He is a board-certified behavior analyst whose research focuses on health conditions and challenging behavior in people with autism and other neurodevelopmental disabilities. His early research focused on establishing and developing video modeling and peer support strategies as evidence-based practices. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities and is a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and Journal of Behavioral Education. He is a long-time member of the American Psychological Association (APA), Association for Behavior Analysis, and TASH. He is also the inaugural recipient of the B. F. Skinner New Researcher Award from the APA and Alice H. Hayden Early Career Award from TASH. During his career he has published over 180 scholarly papers and secured over $17M in extramural support for his teaching, research, and service.

Transcript

Announcer: You’re listening to TASH Amplified, a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning equity, inclusion and opportunity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives.

Today we begin a five-part series of episodes recognizing the 50th anniversary of Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities (or RPSD). In this first episode of our podcast series Dr. Craig Kennedy, the editor of RPSD, introduces the series, explaining this year-long retrospective examination of four outstanding publications in the history of research on inclusion for people with disabilities and how they impacted the field.

[music plays]

Craig Kennedy: Greetings. My name is Craig Kennedy and I’m the Editor-in-Chief of TASH’s research journal, Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, which also goes by the Initialism, RPSD.

RPSD is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and few journals in the history of special education have reached this milestone and we are thrilled to be able to celebrate the journal and TASH’s successes. When TASH was created, the organization’s first president and his colleagues, Norris Herring, Wayne Saylor, Doug Guess and Lou Brown, created a research journal that would blend research, policy and advocacy, and that became RPSD. This configuration of emphases, the research, policy and advocacy was unique at the time, but has become commonplace in applied social sciences. So, like many instances, RPSD and TASH were ahead of their time.

Many of the papers published have changed the way we think about, and support people with extensive support needs. Importantly, RPSD is a peer-reviewed journal, and what that means is that papers that are submitted for possible publication in the journal undergo a rigorous peer review process in which independent experts comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the paper and whether or not, with revisions, it could be published. The papers published are typically very rigorous and very innovative. And most submissions do not meet that standard. In fact, about 20% of the articles submitted to RPSD are eventually published. That makes RPSD a very selective peer-reviewed research journal. And scholars know that if a paper is published in RPSD, the paper is innovative and rigorous.

To celebrate our 50th anniversary, we wanted to highlight the impact RPSD articles have had on the field. People correctly say that research innovation is a methodical and long process. And it is. From the kernel of an idea, to its testing, to its refinement, its replication, and eventually its recognition as an evidence-based practice is a long process.

However, there are sometimes papers published that simply change the way we think about how to support people with extensive support needs, that the moment you read the paper, you realize that I wasn’t thinking this way about the field or what we could do, and this paper is showing me a new way to improve practices or think about ability, disability. And we wanted to celebrate some of those seminal high-impact articles the journal has published.

To do this, the senior editorial board, myself, Fred Spooner, Sarah Ballard, Elizabeth Biggs, Megan Burke, Rob Pennington, Jenny Root, and Zach Rosetti, the associate editors and statistical consultants for the journal, decided to select one high-impact article to highlight in each of the four issues of RPSD being published in its 50th year. Now, we knew it would be a difficult task because there have been many very significant papers published in RPSD over its history. So to identify article articles, we adopted a Delphi technique, a technique which has been used since the 1960s in an effort to canvas the articles published and guide our selection process. Ultimately, after several months of work as a group, we arrived, through consensus, on the four articles to highlight. Those articles are:

• Lou Brown and colleagues, 1983, entitled “Opportunities Available When Severely Handicapped Students Attend Chronological Age Appropriate Regular Schools” [Volume 8, Issue 1]. This paper made the case that students with extensive support needs should attend the same schools as their siblings and neighbors, something that rarely occurred in this period of time. And it set in motion many efforts we now refer to as inclusion or inclusive education.


• The second paper by Tom Haring and his colleagues in 1987 was entitled “Adolescent Peer Tutoring and Special Friend Experiences” [Volume 12, Issue 4]. This was the first study to test how we can facilitate social relationships between students with and without disabilities in inclusive schools. It showed the different approaches like peer tutoring or friendship networks each had benefits and produced positive outcomes for students with and without disabilities.


• The third paper by Rob Horner and his colleagues in 1990 entitled “Toward a Technology of “Nonaversive” Behavioral Support” [Volume 15, Issue 3] ushered in an era of proactive and positive interventions to support people with extensive support needs who engaged in challenging behaviors. This publication presaged the development of functional behavioral assessment, comprehensive support plans and Positive Behavior Supports, all of which were eventually included in IDEA as evidence-based practices.


• The final paper we chose, by Diane Browder and her colleagues from 2006, entitled “Aligning Instruction with Academic Content Standards: Finding the Link” [Volume 31, Issue 4], in this paper, a process for identifying instructional objectives for IEPs that were based on general education curriculum, but that were modified for individual student support needs was outlined. It facilitated the inclusion of students with extensive support needs by aligning their curricular goals with that of other students in the general edu