UA Education Professor Honored With Research Award

TUSCALOOSA, Ala.  — Dr. Sara McDaniel, assistant professor of special education at The University of Alabama, is the 2016 winner of the E.G. “Ted” Carr Initial Researcher Award, given annually by the Association for Positive Behavior Support.

The award is presented annually to early career researchers whose work reflects a commitment to positive behavior support and shows promise of substantial contribution to the field.

McDaniel will be recognized as a recipient of the award in March at the 2016 annual APBS conference in San Francisco, California.

McDaniel’s research has focused on the second tier of the Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports framework, a model established by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs to define, develop, implement, and evaluate a multi-tiered approach to helping schools by impacting emotional, social and academic outcomes for students with disabilities.

The second tier of the framework includes students who are struggling with behavior and the interventions they receive. In contrast, the third tier includes students with severe behavior and intense interventions. Her studies have included students from the pre-k level to adolescents in juvenile detention.

“The Association for Positive Behavior Support is our premier professional organization in the field, so this is quite a humbling honor,” McDaniel said. “I have been fortunate to collaborate with many talented, dedicated, and supportive colleagues in the field throughout my short career, so I am very grateful for those opportunities. I hope to continue finding new ways to improve student outcomes through my research for a very long time to come.”

McDaniel and Dr. John Lochman, UA professor and Saxon Chair of Clinical Psychology, are collaborating on a project to combine Lochman’s clinical-based intervention models with schools’ tier-2 interventions for students with multiple behavioral deficits, like social skills and attention.

Current behavioral intervention models typically focus on a single behavioral deficit, and this would be a more comprehensive model for schools to follow.

McDaniel was heavily involved in the formation and launch of the Alabama Positive Behavior Support Office in the College of Education, which began this summer. The office provides state-wide training and coaching to districts that want to improve positive behavior support. The office supports 40 schools across Birmingham and Huntsville, ranging from kindergarten through high school.

“It is a very exciting time for education in Alabama, specifically for schools and districts who have re-focused their efforts to improve school climate and address problem behavior through the support of the Alabama Positive Behavior Support Office at The University of Alabama,” McDaniel said. “I am happy to see the momentum around PBIS across the state and hope that our new office can further improve state-wide PBIS implementation.”