Chris Milbank

1
Maximizing Student Outcomes What Does
Instructional Fidelity Have to Do with It?

• Chris Milbank
• David E. Forbush
• John Hughes
• Cache County School District
• Consortium
• 2009

2
Instructional Fidelity

• The terms low and high fidelity do not
  belong exclusively to the field of music, but are
  also relevant to the field of education, and have
  been present in the educational research
  literature for many years, and yet, infrequently
  upon the lips of educational interventionists
  (i.e. teachers, paraeducators...) until recently
  coupled with the term response to intervention,
  or RtI.

3
Instructional Fidelity

• Synonyms to high fidelity
• instructional fidelity
• intervention fidelity
• treatment fidelity

4
Instructional Fidelity

• What is Instructional Fidelity?
• Instructional fidelity is a measure of the degree
  to which a teachers instructional behaviors
  align with programmatic
  guidelines or principles of an instructional
  approach
  (Forbush, Milbank Hughes, 2009)
• Treatment integrity refers to the degree to which
  the intervention plan was implemented as planned
  (Duhon, 2005).
• Fidelity of implementation is the delivery of
  instruction in the way in which it was designed
  to be delivered (Gresham, MacMillan,
  Boebe-Frankenberger, Bocian, 2000).

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Instructional Fidelity

• Active collection, analysis and response to
  instructional fidelity data serves multiple
  purposes
• a) to strengthen instruction in the various
  tiers of an RtI model
• b) to increase the likelihood that only
  qualifying students are identified as having
  IDEIA related disabilities
• c) to increase the degree of match between
  local school-based instructional practices and
  practices described in peer reviewed research
• d) to provide instructional interventionists
  with added prescriptive direction in responding
  to students learning difficulties.

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Strengthen Instruction

• That which is not inspected decays! - General
  George S. Patton
• Behavioral drift is an observed phenomenon
  where persons trained to a standard, begin to
  drift from the standard (i.e. typically a
  degradation of the standard versus improvement
  upon the standard).
• In relation to education, instructional fidelity
  data, if collected, summarized, and presented to
  educational interventionists, (i.e. teachers,
  paraeducators) holds great promise for improving
  the power of evidenced-based curriculum and
  instruction.
•  

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Strengthen Instruction

• Collection and use of instructional fidelity data
  demonstrates institutional recognition that
  behavioral drift or degradation from the training
  standard will occur among instructional
  interventionists.
• When these data are aligned with contingencies
  known to affect instructional interventionists
  teaching behaviors, they can re-index their
  instructional delivery to a previously attained
  standard, and one necessary to meaningfully
  impact student learning.

8
Qualify appropriate students for IDEIA services

• IDEIA 2004 requires that
• A child shall not be determined to be a child
  with a disability if the determinant factor for
  such determination is lack of appropriate
  instruction Sec 614.(b)(5).
• This element of the law clearly specifies that
  students are not to be identified as possessing a
  disability and receive services if the observed
  learning behavior derives from inappropriate
  instruction.

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Qualify appropriate students for IDEIA services

• Appropriate instruction consists of two
  elements.
• Element 1 - Curriculum (what we teach)
• Element 2 Instruction (how we teach or deliver
  curriculum)

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Qualify appropriate students for IDEIA services

• Appropriate Instruction - Element 1
  Curriculum
• Must be founded upon correct instructional design
  principles.
• Through repeated trials demonstrates that if
  properly delivered, will consistently lead
  students, naïve to a concept or skill, to mastery
  of the concept or skill, as demonstrated by
  practical or functional use of the concept or
  skill in settings and circumstances which call
  for its use.

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Qualify appropriate students for IDEIA services

• Appropriate Instruction - Element 2
  Instruction
• How we teach/deliver the curriculum must closely
  align with the guidelines offered by the
  developers / researchers of the program or
  instructional approach.

12
Increase match between local and peer reviewed
reported practices

• The evidences supporting a specific program or
  practice (i.e. evidenced-based program or
  practice) were accumulated under precise sets of
  conditions associated with multiple research
  evaluations.
• In our school settings, to obtain results similar
  to those obtained in research evaluations we must
  replicate to the greatest extent possible the
  conditions under which evidences were achieved

13
Increase match between local and peer reviewed
reported practices

• The degree to which we vary our school-based
  implementation conditions from those upon which
  program evidences were established, increases the
  likelihood of producing different results, and
  most likely, less favorable ones.

14
Increase Prescriptive Instructional Direction

• A common reaction to a students poor or failed
  response to instructional interventions, is to
  seek within the student answers to their poor
  or failed response.
• Unfortunate reaction as the answers to altering a
  students response to instruction is best
  addressed by manipulating the curriculum and
  delivery of curriculum to which the student is
  exposed.
•  

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Increase Prescriptive Instructional Direction

• Looking within the student is most apt to
  produce a descriptive label (e.g. learning
  disability, ADHD) but the prescriptive direction
  required to alter the students learning
  trajectory seldom attaches to the label, and if
  so, is often poorly formed and the direction
  offered is general in nature.

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Increase Prescriptive Instructional Direction

• Within an RtI model, the interventions we design
  and apply, produce data which illustrate a
  students responsiveness to the intervention.
  Attentive interventionists will collect two types
  of data to guide their work.

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Increase Prescriptive Instructional Direction

• Interventionists (i.e. teachers,
  paraeducators...) collect data on the students
  acquisition of skills taught, and second, data is
  collected on the integrity with which the
  intervention is applied. Attention to these two
  points reflects a skilled interventionists
  understanding that poor or failed responses arise
  from multiple origins.

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Increase Prescriptive Instructional Direction

• Interventionists (i.e. teachers,
  paraeducators...) collect data on the students
  acquisition of skills taught, and second, data is
  collected on the integrity with which the
  intervention is applied. Attention to these two
  points reflects a skilled interventionists
  understanding that poor or failed responses arise
  from multiple origins.

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Increase Prescriptive Instructional Direction

• First, a students failure to respond may
  originate from a low fidelity intervention.
  Simply put, the intervention may be well
  designed, robust in nature, but when poorly
  delivered, produces poor student outcomes.

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Increase Prescriptive Instructional Direction

• Second, an intervention may be poorly designed,
  weak in nature, and delivered with high fidelity
  and hence poor outcomes.
•  

21
Increase Prescriptive Instructional Direction

• Third, an intervention may be poorly designed in
  terms of its alignment with targeted skills,
  delivered with high fidelity and produce poor
  outcomes.

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Increase Prescriptive Instructional Direction

• Fourth, an intervention may be well designed,
  robust in nature, delivered with high fidelity,
  and yet be weak in terms of managing a students
  responses. Simply put, the intervention is well
  designed and delivered, but weak in terms of its
  attention to soliciting from the student voiced
  or written responses.

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Increase Prescriptive Instructional Direction

• Finally, in the end, the desire is to have a
  well designed intervention that is aligned with
  targeted skills, robust in nature, actively
  solicits student responses, is delivered with
  fidelity and thereby produces meaningful
  outcomes.

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Increase Prescriptive Instructional Direction

•  
• Reviewing student outcome and instructional
  fidelity data teaches an interventionist how to
  achieve the desired student outcome. If either
  data source is missing, interventionists actions
  are inefficient and it will take far longer for
  them to identify an intervention which produces
  the desired response.

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Increase Prescriptive Instructional Direction

• In summary, there are multiple reasons why
  interventionists (i.e. teachers,
  paraeducators...) need to show greater interest,
  and allocate more of their precious resources to
  the collection, analysis and response to
  instructional fidelity data. The most compelling
  reason is the value that instructional fidelity
  has for student achievement. In response to the
  question embedded in our title Maximizing
  Outcomes What Does Instructional Fidelity Have
  to Do with It? Well, it appears quite a lot!