I am interested in learning ways to individualized instruction. I don't have a class and I am willing to learn, like you said if one has a system. It's becomes easier.
To me, the key to individualizing instruction is having assessment data for a particular student to guide intervention development. There is a body of literature referred to as brief experimental analysis or functional academic assessment. The philosophy underlying these assessment systems is identical to the philosophy underlying functional behavior assessment which might be more familiar to readers. The idea is that you can work briefly with a student to identify intervention features that will accelerate an individual student's learning. The first step is to develop a skill hierarchy (this is usually easily done based on logic--- like fluency with sums to 10 comes before fluency with sums to 12 and application problems like word problems should require computation skills that the student is capable of doing correctly/fluently). Then the idea is to sample back through successively easier skills to identify what the student can and cannot do fluently. Then specific features of an intervention can be tested by providing intervention trials and evaluating the effect on student performance. Commonly tested conditions include reducing task difficulty, providing repeated practice on the task, providing incentives for improved performance. My favorite studies and articles on this topic come from Ed Daly. And my favorite article on this approach appeared in School Psychology Review from 1997 by Daly, Witt, Martens, & Dool. Here is how the intervention becomes individualized via assessment:
- If you provide incentives for performance and performance does not improve, this suggests that a skill-building (rather than motivational) intervention is needed. If performance improves with incentives, then this suggests that contingencies for improved performance are an important feature of successful intervention.
- If you have determined that a skill-building intervention is needed, you might try first reducing task difficulty. If student performance is accurate, but slow, then you would provide intervention to build fluency. Strategies that are effective for doing so include brief uninterrupted intervals of practice with goal setting and incentives for more fluent performance (where fluency is defined as accuracy plus speed, see Binder 1996). If you find that with reduced task difficulty, errors are still prevalent and you have verified that the student can perform the subskills required for successful problem completion, then strategies designed to establish correct responding are in order. These strategies include modeling correct responding, providing examples of both incorrect and correct performance, guided practice where the student response can be interrupted to ensure correct problem completion (immediate corrective feedback), use of prompts and cues to signal correct responding.
- Any hypothesis can be evaluated by collecting baseline data, providing a corrective intervention and evaluating the intervention effect. If you want to be absolutely sure, you can then remove the intervention support and if performance declines again, you have confirmation that the intervention is the right one. For those rare cases where none of the typical manipulations improve performance, you can test idiosyncratic causes for poor performance that you might suspect, like some variable related to the specific task materials or some aspect of the problem presentation. That's what's great about this system, anything you suspect, you can systematically test out in a rapid fashion and know that the intervention will work before you invest the resources to deploy it.
- This is super important because most interventions fail because they are not properly implemented.
