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This chapter details the many advantages of utilizing peers as change agents in behavioral interventions, including being a readily available and free resource, increasing opportunities to respond, promoting generalization, being socially valid and culturally relevant, increasing student engagement with intervention, providing access to natural reinforcement, promoting social skill development, and supporting the development of peer social relationships. The chapter also positions peer-mediated interventions as relevant to the development of children and highlights the value and usefulness of identifying the behaviors the intervention is targeting and then emphasizing the importance of the peer’s role. This chapter also discusses the research supporting the effectiveness of peers as interventionists, indicating that they can be reliably trained to carry out interventions in schools.

This study employed an alternating treatment design with a baseline for three English learners in an urban Midwestern middle school to investigate the utility of a culturally adaptive intervention package called Preview-Review. Participants were provided with a scripted bilingual preview of conceptual and contextual information relating to the topic and explicit instruction of passage vocabulary using cognates, multiple exemplars, and reinforcement. The effects of repeated readings alone and in combination with preview-review were measured on oral reading fluency, reading comprehension score, and reading comprehension rate. Results indicated that the repeated readings with preview-review were superior to the repeated readings stand-alone condition across all target variables. The study also finds support for the use of reading comprehension rate for progress monitoring intervention effectiveness with English learners.

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