Timothy A. Slocum

Teaching Phonological Awareness to Young Children with Learning Disabilities

This study examined the feasibility of teaching phonological manipulation skills to preschool children with disabilities. Forty-seven children, 4–6 years old, enrolled in a special education preschool, were randomly assigned to receive training in one of three categories of phonological tasks (rhyming, blending, and segmenting) or a control group. Results indicated that children were able to make significant progress in each experimental category, but that they demonstrated little or no generalization either within a category (e.g., from one type of blending task to another type of blending task) or between categories (e.g., from blending to segmenting). Although the childrens level of cognitive development significantly predicted some learning outcomes, it did not appear to limit the learning of phonological tasks.

Evidence-based Practice: A Framework for Making Effective Decisions

The research to practice gap in education has been a long-standing concern. The enactment of No Child Left Behind brought increased emphasis on the value of using scientifically based instructional practices to improve educational outcomes. It also brought education into the broader evidence-based practice movement that started in medicine and has spread across a number of human service disciplines. Although the term evidence-based practice has become ubiquitous in education, there is no common agreement about what it means. In this paper, we offer a definition of evidence-based practice, provide a rationale for it, and discuss some of the main tenants of evidence-based practice. Additionally, we describe a decision-making model that features the relationships between the critical sources of influence and the chief responsibilities of evidence-based practitioners.

The Effect of a Narrative Intervention on Story Retelling and Personal Story Generation Skills of Preschoolers With Risk Factors and Narrative Language Delays

Narration, or storytelling, is an important aspect of language. Narrative skills have academic and social importance. This study evaluated the effects of a narrative intervention on story retelling and personal story generation skills of preschoolers with risk factors and narrative language delays. Narrative intervention was delivered in a small group arrangement, and materials, activities, and assistance were systematically adjusted within sessions to facilitate increasingly independent practice of oral narration. Participants were 5 preschoolers enrolled in a Head Start classroom who performed below average on two narrative language tasks. Participants made substantial gains in narrative retelling, demonstrated improved preintervention to postintervention scores for personal story generations, and maintained improvements when assessed following a 2-week break. These results have several implications for practice, including narrative intervention’s versatility with a range of children from diverse backgrounds and its use of economic and efficient classroom-based small group formats for intervention.

Promoting Behavioral Variability in Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Literature Review

Repetitive behavior is a hallmark feature of autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and can have adverse consequences related to social stigma and low rates of skill acquisition. Basic research suggests that variability, or the extent to which one response differs from previous responses, is amenable to antecedent and consequence manipulations. This article describes the concept of variability, synthesizes the findings of 14 recent studies on interventions to increase the variability of behavior in individuals with ASD, and proposes preliminary guidelines for practitioners that focus on building response repertoires, implementing contingencies to produce and maintain variability, and incorporating prompts to vary responding.

The Evidence-Based Practice of Applied Behavior Analysis

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is a model of professional decision-making in which practitioners integrate the best available evidence with client values/context and clinical expertise in order to provide services for their clients. This framework provides behavior analysts with a structure for pervasive use of the best available evidence in the complex settings in which they work. This structure recognizes the need for clear and explicit understanding of the strength of evidence supporting intervention options, the important contextual factors including client values that contribute to decision making, and the key role of clinical expertise in the conceptualization, intervention, and evaluation of cases. Opening the discussion of EBP in this journal, Smith (The Behavior Analyst, 36, 7–33, 2013) raised several key issues related to EBP and applied behavior analysis (ABA). The purpose of this paper is to respond to Smith’s arguments and extend the discussion of the relevant issues. Although we support many of Smith’s (The Behavior Analyst, 36, 7–33, 2013) points, we contend that Smith’s definition of EBP is significantly narrower than definitions that are used in professions with long histories of EBP and that this narrowness conflicts with the principles that drive applied behavior analytic practice. We offer a definition and framework for EBP that aligns with the foundations of ABA and is consistent with well-established definitions of EBP in medicine, psychology, and other professions. In addition to supporting the systematic use of research evidence in behavior analytic decision making, this definition can promote clear communication about treatment decisions across disciplines and with important outside institutions such as insurance companies and granting agencies.

A review of research and theory on the relation between oral reading rate and reading comprehension

We review the conceptual and empirical literature on the relation between oral reading rate and reading comprehension. Three lines of conceptual analysis converge on this relation: (a) application of basic behavior analytic principles suggests that fluent decoding should produce better reading comprehension through direct and indirect relations, (b) behavior analytic understanding of the importance of the rate of behavior as developed by Skinner, Lindsley and Haughton implies that higher reading rate contributes to improved comprehension, and (c) cognitive theory of automaticity explicitly states that high rate reading sets the stage for effective comprehension. A wealth of correlational evidence indicates that reading rate and reading comprehension covary. These results have been replicated across elementary grades and across a variety of measures of reading comprehension. However, experimental analyses have not convincingly demonstrated a functional relation between the two. Experimental work has yielded results that are mixed at best. Examination of experimental design issues shows that although this is not a simple relation to investigate, behavior analysts can make major contributions to understanding the possible functional relation between reading rate and reading comprehension.

Evaluation of Synchronous Online Tutoring for Students at Risk of Reading Failure

This study examined the effects of online reading instruction for at-risk fourth-grade students in Philadelphia. The authors used a multiple baseline design to assess the extent to which the students increased their oral reading rate given systematic supplemental online reading instruction. Tutoring consisted of 4 sessions per week with 50-min lessons of instruction delivered over Adobe Connect™. Analysis of the multiple baseline across participants revealed gains in oral reading fluency for all participants when placed into the synchronous online tutoring program. Participating students and tutors reported an awareness of increased reading skills and value of synchronous online instruction. Teachers and parents generally reported that students demonstrated increased reading skills after receiving instruction.

Comparing Results of Systematic Reviews: Parallel Reviews of Research on Repeated Reading

Education and related services are relying increasingly on empirically supported treatments (ESTs), which have been shown to improve student outcomes through rigorous research. Many organizations have developed review systems with guidelines for judging the quality of studies and identifying ESTs. However, little explicit attention has been paid to issues of validity of these review systems. In this study, we used the criteria developed by Horner and colleagues (2005), Gersten and colleagues (2005), and the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC, 2008; Kratochwill et al., 2010) to evaluate the research base on repeated reading. The corpus of literature reviewed was derived from previous narrative literature reviews and meta-analyses that concluded that repeated reading was an effective intervention for improving reading fluency. However, the review systems employed in this study resulted in the conclusion that repeated reading did not have enough high quality research support to be considered an EST. The current reviews relied on strict criteria for the quality of each individual study, whereas the previous reviews and meta-analyses included studies with a wider range of quality. These results demonstrate that systematic reviews that strictly appraise the quality of studies and reject those not meeting standards can be substantially more conservative than other scientific review methods. The finding that these different review methods (narrative, meta-analysis, and systematic) can produce diverging recommendations raises issues of validity for practice recommendations.

Direct Instruction: The Big Ideas

Publisher Summary Direct Instruction (DI) is a systematic attempt to build a technology of effective academic instruction that includes all of the school-based components necessary to produce academic growth. The general skill of speaking in complete sentences is a big idea in preschool language development programs. The next component of DI is a program that organizes the content and specifies the procedures to teach that content. An instructional program is similar to a staircase that climbs from its base in prerequisite skills to its top at the programs objectives. To teach effectively and efficiently, big ideas must be conveyed to the students clearly, simply, and directly. The details of communication depend on the learners skills and the nature of the subject matter, but all communication is ultimately based on the use of examples. DI programs use an elaborate and detailed analysis of communication to produce instruction that is consistent with only one interpretation.

Large group narrative intervention in Head Start preschools: Implications for response to intervention

This study investigated the effect of a large group narrative intervention on diverse preschoolers’ narrative language skills with aims to explore questions of treatment efficacy and differential response to intervention. A quasi-experimental, pretest/posttest comparison group research design was employed with 71 preschool children. Classrooms were randomly assigned to treatment and comparison conditions. Intervention consisted of explicit teaching of narrative structure via repeated story retell practice, illustrations and icons, and peer mediation. Children’s narrative language and comprehension were assessed at Pretest, Posttest, and 4 weeks after treatment. Statistically significant differences between treatment and comparison groups were found on retell and story comprehension measures. A priori classification criteria resulted in 28 percent of the participants identified as Minimal Responders on the story retell measure and 19 percent as Minimal Responders on the story comprehension measure. Children who were dual-language learners did not have a different pattern of response than monolingual English speakers. Low-intensity narrative intervention delivered to a large group of children was efficacious and can serve as a targeted language intervention for use within preschool classrooms. A culturally and linguistically appropriate, dynamic approach to assessment identified children for whom intensified intervention would be recommended.