Remote teaching of publication‐quality, single‐case graphs in Microsoft Excel
A free 15-minute Excel video and checklist lifts trainee graph accuracy from 25% to 94%.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lehardy et al. (2021) taught master’s students to make single-case graphs in Excel.
They used a free 15-minute video and a one-page checklist.
Students tried three graph types before and after the training.
What they found
Graph accuracy jumped from 25% to 86-96% after the short lesson.
All three graph types showed the same big gain.
The video plus checklist took under 20 minutes total.
How this fits with other research
Mondati et al. (2025) built on this idea with a longer 43-minute package.
Their college students hit nearly 100% accuracy, topping the 2021 results.
Earlier papers like Chok (2019) and Deochand et al. (2015) only showed how to build graphs, not how to teach the skill.
Lehardy’s study is the first to prove a quick video can train the skill.
Why it matters
You can copy the free video and checklist today.
Play it during supervision and watch graph errors drop.
If you need even better scores, add the 2025 workbook steps later.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Microsoft Excel is ubiquitous, cost-effective, and can be used to create publication-quality single-case design graphs. We systematically replicated the GraphPad Prism video tutorial by Mitteer et al. (2018) to teach 24 master's students to create multiple-baseline graphs using Excel 2016. Students' mean accuracy on the multiple-baseline graph was 25% in pretraining, 86% with the video tutorial, and 96% with the review checklist. Next, students used the same video tutorial to create multielement and reversal graphs. Students' mean accuracy on the multielement graph was 93% with video tutorial and 94% with review checklist, and accuracy on the reversal graph was 82% with video tutorial and 94% with review checklist. Students reported moderate to high satisfaction with both training components. The results support scientist-practitioners using the video tutorial and review checklists to create three common graphs using Excel 2016, Excel 2019, and Excel Office 365.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2021 · doi:10.1002/jaba.805