What does the research indicate about intervention effectiveness beyond implementation fidelity—group size, minutes per day, and days per week?
This is an excellent question and I am not sure that I will think of everything that matters beyond the very important factors mentioned in the question. Clearly, one important additional factor is the quality or strength of the intervention. Instructional and behavioral interventions vary significantly in quality and strength, ranging from some popular interventions that have little or no effects to interventions that produce large effect sizes. I will attach to this response a
table on intervention effect sizes from a chapter I am writing on Response to Intervention.
A second very important influence in intervention effects is behavioral assessment and formative evaluation. There now are a variety of behavior assessment tools including curriculum based measures in reading, math, and written language that are useful to determining progress. Coupled with formative evaluation methods, the behavior assessment measures assist teachers and others in determining when instruction is working as intended and when instruction needs to be modified in order to achieve better results. The TQ paper by Dan Reschly in the
Overview of RTIand by Kim Gibbons on
assessment in RTI address the use of frequent, direct measures and formative evaluation to improve results for children.
Thanks for these very interesting questions. I hope these responses are useful. My best wishes to all for a great Independence Day holiday.
Dan Reschly
