Using Direct and Indirect Functional Assessments to Guide the Selection of Individualized Academic Interventions
A quick checklist helps teachers choose lessons that give kids more correct answers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four students who struggled in class tried two kinds of lessons.
First the teacher filled out the new Academic Diagnostic Checklist-Beta.
The checklist picked one lesson style for each child.
Then the kids tried both the picked style and the opposite style.
The team counted correct answers to see which style worked best.
What they found
Three kids scored higher when they got the lesson the checklist chose.
The fourth kid did the same either way.
In other words, the checklist beat a lucky guess most of the time.
How this fits with other research
Luiselli (1991) drew the first map: find the cause, then pick the fix.
TCruz-Montecinos et al. (2024) now give teachers a ready-made map for school work.
Marcell et al. (1988) proved the same idea stops self-injury.
They taught communication when the behavior was social, and used DRI when it was sensory.
Dykens et al. (1991) showed big ABA packages can raise scores for a whole school.
The new study shrinks that giant plan into a one-page checklist any teacher can use.
Why it matters
You no longer need days of testing to pick a useful academic fix.
Fill out the ADC-B in minutes, match the profile, and teach.
If the result mirrors the study, most of your learners will get more answers right on Monday.
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Join Free →Pick one struggling student, fill out the ADC-B, run the indicated lesson style for ten minutes, and count correct answers versus yesterday.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
When teachers work with students exhibiting academic failure, they may look to factors outside of instruction such as a student's home life or perceived disability as explanations. Placing the locus of control outside of the instructional context becomes a convenient way to escape culpability for unsatisfactory outcomes. A more functional approach to addressing academic deficits allows educators to determine environmental factors responsible for the lack of progress and then create interventions designed to address these functions of academic failure. Although experimental analyses serve as the gold standard for evaluating functional relations between behavior and environment, educators may not always have the ability to systematically test all behavior-environment relations. Indirect assessments provide one means to develop hypotheses about environment-behavior relations that can then be validated with experimental analyses. In this study, researchers developed an indirect tool (Academic Diagnostic Checklist - Beta; ADC-B) based on the function of academic performance deficits (Daly et al. in School Psychology Review 26:554, 1997) and validated the use of the ADC-B by comparing interventions that were suggested (indicated) and those non-suggested (contraindicated) by the ADC-B. Researchers used the ADC-B with four participants and found that for three of the four participants, the suggested intervention was the most efficacious at improving accuracy with the target skills. One limitation is that we did not evaluate the full technical adequacy of the ADC-B, which should be a focus of future research.<h4>Supplementary information</h4>The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10864-023-09511-x.
, 2024 · doi:10.1007/s10864-023-09511-x