Learning Strategies Curriculum: Essay Test-Taking Strategy
Study: Therrien et al. (2009)

Describe how students were selected to participate in the study:

Students enrolled in seventh or eighth grade, had an identified learning disability in written expression and/or reading, who had a writing goal on their Individualized Education Program were selected for the study.

Describe how students were identified as being at risk for academic failure (AI) or as having emotional or behavioral difficulties (BI):

All students were identified as having a learning disability via a discrepancy model following state of Ohio guidelines,

ACADEMIC INTERVENTION: What percentage of participants were at risk, as measured by one or more of the following criteria:

• below the 30th percentile on local or national norm, or
• identified disability related to the focus of the intervention?

100.0%

BEHAVIORAL INTERVENTION: What percentage of participants were at risk, as measured by one or more of the following criteria:

• emotional disability label,
• placed in an alternative school/classroom,
• non-responsive to Tiers 1 and 2, or
• designation of severe problem behaviors on a validated scale or through observation?

%

Specify which condition is the submitted intervention:

The submitted intervention (instruction in the Essay Test-taking Strategy) is the treatment condition.

Specify which condition is the control condition:

The control condition was business as usual. j

If you have a third, competing condition, in addition to your control and intervention condition, identify what the competing condition is (data from this competing condition will not be used):

Using the tables that follow, provide data demonstrating comparability of the program group and control group in terms of demographics.

Grade Level

Race–Ethnicity

Socioeconomic Status

Disability Status

ELL Status

Gender

What method was used to determine students' placement in treatment/control groups?

Random

Please describe the assignment method or the process for defining treatment/comparison groups.

Students were first blocked by classrooms, ensuring the an equal number of students from each of three classrooms were represented in the treatment and control groups. Then a randomized class list was generated for each class. From this list, students were assigned to treatment or control using a random digits number chart with students who received an even number assigned to the treatment and those receiving an odd number assigned to the control.

What was the unit of assignment?

Students

If other, please specify:

Please describe the unit of assignment:

Individual students were assigned to either treatment or control.

What unit(s) were used for primary data analysis?

Schools
Teachers
Students
Classes
Other
If other, please specify:

Please describe the unit(s) used for primary data analysis:

Individual student data were used for the primary data analysis.

How was the program delivered?

Individually
Small Group
Classroom

What were the background, experience, training, and ongoing support of the instructors or interventionists?

The instructor was a graduate student who had earned a Master's Degree in reading education. He was a certified teacher and had taught high school language arts. He read the instructor's manual and was trained by the first author to implement the instruction.

Describe when and how fidelity of treatment information was obtained.

Two graduate students observed the instruction and independently recorded the implementation or omission of each step in a list of steps for the program during 100% of the instructional sessions. Agreements between the two scorers were tallied. The number of agreements was divided by the total number of agreements possible.

What were the results on the fidelity-of-treatment implementation measure?

The percentage of agreement was 97.5% with a range of 87.5% to 100% per session.

Was the fidelity measure also used in control classrooms?

No. There was no instruction for the control students. They simply attended their study hall as usual. Thus, there was no instruction to observe.

For any substantively (e.g., effect size ≥ 0.25 for pretest or demographic differences) or statistically significant (e.g., p < 0.05) pretest differences, please describe the extent to which these differences are related to the impact of the treatment. For example, if analyses were conducted to determine that outcomes from this study are due to the intervention and not pretest characteristics, please describe the results of those analyses here.

There were no pretest differences discovered. See Table 1 on page 16.

Please explain any missing data or instances of measures with incomplete pre- or post-test data.

Two students in the control group were missing during the posttest. Their data have not been included in the study.

If you have excluded a variable or data that are reported in the study being submitted, explain the rationale for exclusion:

A third group of students was included in the study. These were 10 students (7 males/3 female; 8th graders) without disabilities who were used as a normative comparison group for the pretest. The reasoning was that if the students in the treatment group scored as well as the normative group on the posttest, this would be a measure of whether the treatment group students were equivalent in performance as their non-disabled peers. The results showed that the treatment group students scored significantly higher than the normative group on the strategy specific measure. The comparisons on the general essay measure were mixed. Since we couldn't figure out how to report the results for this third group in the tables, we did not report the results for these comparisons. However, they are clearly displayed in Tables 4 and 5 in the article under the heading "Regular Education."

Describe the analyses used to determine whether the intervention produced changes in student outcomes:

The analyses that were utilized were ANCOVA comparisons between the treatment and control groups while using the pretest scores as the covariate. (These analyses were also used between the treatment group and the normative group.)