Like many Title 1 schools in the United States, the host site for this study in rural South Carolina represents a widespread literacy crisis in our public education system. In this particular school, only 20% of 3rd graders demonstrated proficient reading skills. Although extremely effective precision teaching-based literacy intervention programs have been developed in the private sector, such as the Fit Learning™ model, the extensive time and related costs of training classroom teachers in those methods prohibit struggling schools on tight budgets. As such, the current study sought to develop and test the feasibility of a truncated version of the Fit Learning™ model, dubbed Fit Lite™. Fourteen students identified by the school as "high risk" for literacy struggles were instructed in the Fit Lite™ model in their after-school program. With expert oversight and only 1 week of training, a group of 4 implementers with no prior experience using precision teaching or implementing Fit Lite™ produced promising reading improvements. Over the course of approximately 12 weeks, the 14 students improved by an average of 16 percentile points against the national average on standardized progress-monitoring tools. Details of the Fit Lite™ model, results achieved in this study, and considerations for future replications are described.
Keywords at risk . early literacy . precision teaching . Read to SucceedA literacy crisis persists in the United States, with nearly two thirds of fourth and eighth graders nationwide unable to read proficiently and only one in five Black students is a proficient reader (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2019). More than 30 states have passed third-grade reading laws incorporating prevention, intervention, and retention strategies over the past 12 years (National Center for Learning Disabilities, 2019). These laws have been implemented in an attempt to disrupt the premature transition from learning to read to reading to learn that often occurs when students advance from third to fourth grade. In
A positive and expected by-product of a well-programmed instructional sequence is an escalation of learning, where skills are acquired more quickly as teaching goes on. Despite the importance of this effect in behavior analysis and education, techniques for detecting and analyzing it are rarely observed in practice settings. A behavioral approach to this phenomenon is rooted in the term agility, which has persisted in the precision-teaching community as a description of desirable acquisition patterns. Precision teachers have long carried forward a loose definition of agility as “celerating celerations.” Although this definition might succeed in generally orienting practitioners toward the goal of helping people acquire new skills more quickly, its lack of technical specificity has hindered efforts to fully integrate such analyses into practice. In this article, the authors define agility and distinguish it from other concepts common to education and behavior analysis. Further, a tutorial for quantifying and analyzing agility using frequency, celeration, and bounce multipliers is presented in detail. Finally, the practical implications afforded by analyses of agility are delineated.
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