The presence of students identified as having special needs as a moderating effect on their classmates’ reading comprehension scores in relation to other major class composition effects

This study investigates the impact of the presence of students identified as having special needs (SEN) on their classmates’ achievements in reading comprehension. Multi-level regression modelling was conducted with the data of more than 75,000 fourth graders of 4,937 classes in Austria. Students’ scores of reading comprehension were used as the dependent variable in the models. The number of students with SEN was used as the independent...