The collection and use of data are generally accepted as important educational practices. Nevertheless, evidence exists that interventionists' data collection practices tend to be infrequent and nonsystematic. This study investigated the perspectives of early childhood interventionists about the use of data in their classrooms. Perspectives about the use of data for monitoring children's progress, improving instruction, and communicating with families and other professionals also were studied. Participants were teachers, assistant teachers, and therapists in an integrated setting. Participants identified a number of perceived barriers, including the nature of the setting, management issues, lack of time and skill, and the nature of individualized education programs. Implications for improving the data collection practices of early childhood interventionists are discussed.

Interventionists' Perspectives about Data Collection in Integrated Early Childhood Classrooms

This article proposes a developmental model to socialize teachers at all levels (preservice, novice, and experienced) and in all positions (general education, special education, elementary school, middle school, and high school) in the methodology of action research. A process for advancing professional understanding is theorized to include the phases of acquisition, fluency, and generalization. Within each phase, a confluence of skills, abilities, attitudes, and contexts are addressed to highlight critical considerations that facilitate the systematic acculturation of teachers to this potentially compelling research approach.

Action Research: A Developmental Model of Professional Socialization

The Effects of Self-Monitoring on Teacher's Data-Based Decisions and on the Progress of Adults with Severe Mental Retardation.

The purpose of this paper was to examine and integrate the findings of empirical research on the effectiveness of basic motor skills instruction for children with neuromotor delays. Twenty-eight studies were identified. The methodology and effectiveness of the specific training approaches implemented in each study were analyzed. Training approaches were classified into one of four frameworks: neuromotor interventions, sensory integration techniques, behavioral programming, and naturalistic programming. Analysis of study findings indicate that progress in developing and conducting rigorous empirical investigations to address questions of effectiveness of motor intervention techniques is occurring, albeit slowly. The area with the strongest research base is behavioral programming. All approaches, however, lack comprehensive assessment of generalization and maintenance, especially in terms of response generalization, generalization to the natural environment, and maintenance. In fact, the issue of generaliza...

Basic Motor Skills Instruction for Children with Neuromotor Delays A Critical Review

Educators, school psychologists, and other professionals must evaluate student progress and decide to continue, modify, or terminate instructional programs to ensure student success. For this purpose, progress-monitoring data are often collected, plotted graphically, and visually analyzed. The current study evaluated the impact of three common formats for visual analysis (scatter plots, scatter plots with trend lines, and scatter plots with trend and aim lines) on the decision accuracy of 52 novice analysts. All participants viewed 18 time-series graphs that depicted student growth on a continuous metric (e.g., oral reading fluency). Participants rated each graph as depicting substantial progress, minimal progress, or no progress. The magnitude of the true slope for each graph was fixed to 3.00 (substantial progress), 0.75 (minimal progress), or 0 (no progress). Inferential analyses were used to determine the probability of a participant correctly identifying different magnitudes of trend in the presence of different visual aids (no visual aid, trend line, and trend line with aim line). The odds of correctly identifying trend were influenced by visual aid (p < .01) and trend magnitude (p < .01). The addition of a trend line resulted in a sharp increase in the probability of making a correct decision. Graphs depicting minimal progress reduced the probability of a correct decision.

An Evaluation of the Effects of Graphic Aids in Improving Decision Accuracy in a Continuous Treatment Design

This study used a counterbalanced ABA withdrawal design to look at several aspects of data collection on instructional programs that have been taught for more than 1 month. The results indicated that (a) teaching assistants could accurately teach such programs without using a data sheet to guide them through the task analysis; (b) accuracy of judging how well a student performed during a session was surprisingly similar in the data and no data conditions, though there were slight increases in accuracy under the data condition on four of the five programs; (c) all three of the teaching assistants made more accurate statements about how well a student's current performance compared with his/her previous performance when data were collected than when data were not collected, and (d) the teaching assistants also agreed more often with the instructional decisions of experts when data were collected.

Lane Chazdon

Papers

Hey, Do We Really Have to Take Data?: