About

Christopher J. Lemons, Ph.D., is a Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. His research focuses on improving academic outcomes for children and adolescents with intellectual, developmental, and learning disabilities. His recent work has concentrated on developing and evaluating reading interventions for individuals with Down syndrome and other intellectual and developmental disabilities. His areas of expertise include reading interventions for children and adolescents with learning and intellectual disabilities, data-based individualization, and intervention-related assessment and professional development. Lemons has secured funding to support his research from the Institute of Education Sciences, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education within the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Institutes of Health. He serves as a Senior Advisor of the National Center on Intensive Intervention and the Progress Center, both within the American Institutes of Research. Additionally, he chairs the Executive Committee of the Pacific Coast Research Conference and is the President-Elect of the Council for Exceptional Children’s Division of Research. Lemons has received several awards, including the Pueschel-Tjossem Research Award from the National Down Syndrome Congress, the Distinguished Early Career Research Award from the Council for Exceptional Children’s Division, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Obama in 2016. Prior to his academic career, Lemons taught in various special education settings, including a preschool autism unit, an elementary resource and inclusion program, and a middle school life skills classroom. His research interests encompass achievement, adolescence, assessment and testing, brain and learning sciences, child development, curriculum and instruction, data sciences, elementary and secondary education, equity in education, literacy and language, professional development, race and ethnicity, research methods, school reform, special education, teachers and teaching, and technology and education.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Mathematics education
• Natural Language Processing
• Linguistics
• Pedagogy
• Developmental psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• World Wide Web
• Medical education
• Applied psychology
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Enduring Issues in Special Education

  2026-04-20

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Do We Still Need Special Education?

  2026-04-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Inclusive Special Education: What Do We Mean and What Do We Want?

  Remedial and Special Education · 2024-08-12 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The United States will soon recognize the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975. Considering the past 50 years in special education, we organized this special issue of Remedial and Special Education focused on inclusive education of students with disabilities in international contexts. Just as a broad array of U.S. educators have grappled with improving how the education system might most effectively include students with disabilities, educational leaders in various countries across the globe have been addressing the same question: How can we design inclusive education for students with disabilities that effectively meets their needs? The manuscripts included in this special issue represent five countries—India, Japan, Norway, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea. Each paper presents background on the inclusion of students with disabilities within the focus country and highlights recent advances in and proposes next steps for policy, practice, and research. Collectively, we hope the issue expands readers’ thinking about what special education could be, encourages our community to set specific goals for our next ‘milestone anniversary,’ and ignites conversations about the specific steps we need to accomplish our goals.

  PublisherDOI

• The Effects of Paraeducator-Implemented Interventions on Student Literacy Skill Acquisition: A Review

  Remedial and Special Education · 2024-03-05 · 1 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Paraeducators are increasingly tasked with delivering early literacy instruction to students with disabilities in elementary schools. This review synthesized findings from 19 studies that examined paraeducator-implemented early literacy instruction and reported the included studies’ descriptive characteristics, methodological quality, and treatment outcomes. Studies were rated for methodological quality using the Council for Exceptional Children’s quality indicators. This systematic review was the first to describe paraeducator-implemented early literacy instruction in elementary school settings across single-case research designs and between-group research designs and the first to apply a set of quality indicators to rate study quality. The synthesized evidence suggests that, with the appropriate training and supervision, paraeducators were able to facilitate student acquisition in phonological knowledge, word reading, fluency, comprehension, and spelling domains. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Assessing the Criterion Validity of Curriculum-Based Measures for Children with Intellectual Disabilities

  The Journal of Special Education · 2023-04-22 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  Curriculum-based measures (CBMs), which allow educators to monitor progress over time and make instructional decisions based on student performance, represent a fixture of general approaches to reading and data-based instructional frameworks. However, evidence supporting the use of CBM for students with intellectual disabilities is limited. This study evaluated the criterion validity of a reading CBM battery. Multiple CBM and standardized criterion measures were administered to elementary-age children ( N = 56) with intellectual disabilities. Inferential analyses identified numerous domain-specific correlations between CBM and criterion measures; however, no single CBM emerged as a more effective predictor of reading performance. Findings provide qualified support for the use of CBM with children who have intellectual disabilities.

  PublisherDOI

• Measuring kindergarteners’ motivational beliefs about writing: a mixed-methods exploration of alternate assessment formats

  Frontiers in Psychology · 2023-08-04 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  There have been a handful of studies on kindergarteners' motivational beliefs about writing, yet measuring these beliefs in young children continues to pose a set of challenges. The purpose of this exploratory, mixed-methods study was to examine how kindergarteners understand and respond to different assessment formats designed to capture their motivational beliefs about writing. Across two studies, we administered four assessment formats - a 4-point Likert-type scale survey, a binary choice survey, a challenge preference task, and a semi-structured interview - to a sample of 114 kindergarteners engaged in a larger writing intervention study. Our overall goals were to examine the benefits and challenges of using these assessment formats to capture kindergarteners' motivational beliefs and to gain insight on future directions for studying these beliefs in this young age group. Many participants had a difficult time responding to the 4-point Likert-type scale survey, due to challenges with the response format and the way the items were worded. However, more simplified assessment formats, including the binary choice survey and challenge preference task, may not have fully captured the nuances and complexities of participants' motivational beliefs. The semi-structured interview leveraged participants' voices and highlighted details that were overlooked in the other assessment formats. Participants' interview responses were deeply intertwined with their local, everyday experiences and pushed back on common assumptions of what constitutes negatively oriented motivational beliefs about writing. Overall, our results suggest that kindergarteners' motivational beliefs appear to be multifaceted, contextually grounded, and hard to quantify. Additional research is needed to further understand how motivational beliefs are shaped during kindergarten. We argue that motivational beliefs must be studied in context rather than in a vacuum, in order to work toward a fair and meaningful understanding of motivational beliefs about writing that can be applied to school settings.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Parent-Implemented Reading Intervention for Children With Intellectual and Developmental Disability

  Remedial and Special Education · 2023-11-21 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDDs) require intensive multicomponent interventions to learn to read. Parent-implemented interventions have been shown to be effective for children with disabilities and are one potential method for providing intervention. This study used a multiple probe single case design to evaluate the effectiveness of an early multicomponent reading intervention implemented by parents in the home. This study was designed as a conceptual replication of Lemons et al. in response to concerns with the overall quality of instruction during schooling at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Three U.S. parents of children with IDD (ages 4–7 years) participated in this study. Results indicated that with systematic training, coaching, and feedback, parents were able to positively impact their child’s reading abilities and implement the intervention with fidelity.

  PublisherDOI

• Reading Achievement and Growth Mindset of Students With Reading Difficulties or Reading Disabilities

  2022-02-28 · 1 citations

  book-chapter

  Growth mindset interventions are aimed at helping students understand that effort and practice lead to improvements in academic domains and that current levels of performance are not fixed or unchangeable. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the current state of research regarding relations between mindset-related constructs and reading achievement and to describe the effects of such interventions on mindset and reading achievement for students with reading difficulties and disabilities. Implications for research and practice are provided. Additionally, limitations and promising goals for the next decade of research focused on improving growth mindset interventions are outlined.

  PublisherDOI

• Research-Based Practices and Intervention Innovations

  2022-02-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the state of research regarding relations between mindset-related constructs and reading achievement and describe the effects of interventions on mindset and reading achievement for students with reading difficulties and disabilities. It examines the theoretical and empirical support for the well-being of educators working within tiered systems and provide an overview of the research on the well-being of teachers who work in tiered systems and implications for treatment integrity and teacher efficacy. The book describes mechanisms by which working conditions affect the capacity of the special education teacher workforce, discuss how working conditions contribute to special education teachers’ experiences and outcomes, and consider how working conditions affect the capacity of educational systems to meet their obligations to students. It focuses on the two most common forms of reading difficulties: word-level reading and reading comprehension.

  PublisherDOI

• The Effect of Supplemental Reading Instruction on Fluency Outcomes for Children With Down Syndrome: A Closer Look at Curriculum-Based Measures

  Exceptional Children · 2022-03-29 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  Research supports the efficacy of intensive literacy instruction for children with moderate intellectual disabilities and Down syndrome (DS). However, much of the literature features measures closely aligned with evaluated interventions. Despite their increasing role in instruction, curriculum-based measures (CBM) are rarely featured in reading studies involving DS. Increasing the use of CBM in research has the potential to provide insight into the effectiveness of intervention and address concerns regarding the utility of approaches predicated on CBM. This single-case design study used CBM to examine the performance of children with DS ( N = 17) who had largely exhibited gains on intervention-aligned measures following an intensive reading intervention. Results of multilevel modeling were mixed, with significant ( p < .05) effects relegated to letter- and first-sound fluency. No more than 29% of participants met goals created using a procedure derived from CBM. Findings have implications for future studies and implementation of literacy interventions for children with DS.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Seth King

  University of Iowa

  15 shared

• Douglas Fuchs

  Vanderbilt University

  14 shared

• Kimberly A. Davidson

  University of North Georgia

  14 shared

• Stephanie Al Otaiba

  Southern Methodist University

  13 shared

• Samantha A. Gesel

  University of North Carolina at Charlotte

  12 shared

• Anne C. Sinclair

  12 shared

• Lauren M. LeJeune

  University of South Carolina

  9 shared

• Lynn S. Fuchs

  American Institutes for Research

  8 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Education

  Stanford University

Awards & honors

• Pueschel-Tjossem Research Award from the National Down Syndr…
• Distinguished Early Career Research Award from the Council f…
• Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers…