A More Rigorous Approach to Determining Intervention Effectiveness

Friday, May 31, 2019 - 3:30pm

A nearly $900K grant from IES supports Ethan Van Norman’s work to develop a quantitatively rigorous and user-friendly measure of the effectiveness of interventions for students with disabilities and learning difficulties.

Schools provide interventions for students with disabilities and learning difficulties to help those students overcome academic challenges and succeed in the classroom. But how does a teacher or researcher know if an intervention is working or not for an individual child?

Applied researchers—those who investigate academic interventions in schools—and practitioners such as school psychologists and special education teachers traditionally use visual analysis to monitor individual student improvement, examining a graph based on student performance before, during and after an intervention.

“It makes sense just to monitor growth, but there are a lot of statistical variables and statistical problems that go into modeling growth for an individual student because most of our available techniques rely upon hundreds or thousands of students to model growth,” explains Ethan Van Norman, an assistant professor of school psychology.