Instructional Delivery

Heward and Wood consider a range of instructional practices that were identified by participants of the eighth Wing Institute summit and make an argument that Active Student Responding (ASR) has the potential to significantly improve student learning. The authors consider ASR in the context of the positive benefits and the cost considerations including equipment/materials, training, logistical fit, and the fit with the teacher's belief about effective instruction.

The usual approach to determining if an intervention is effective for a student is to review student outcome data; however, this is only part of the task. Student data can only be understood if we know something about how well the intervention was implemented. Student data without treatment integrity data are largely meaningless because without knowing how well an intervention has been implemented, no judgments can be made about the effectiveness of the intervention. Poor outcomes can be a function of an ineffective intervention or poor implementation of the intervention. Without treatment integrity data, the is a risk that an intervention will be judged as ineffective when, in fact, the quality of implementation was so inadequate that it would be unreasonable to expect positive outcomes.