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Intervention Integrity
Teachers in schools are charged with the task of maintaining the integrity of the ERIK intervention. To ensure the integrity (and the best possible outcome for students) of the ERIK intervention program, students need to be placed in the most appropriate teaching pathway. The ERIK assessment profile is used to establish the most appropriate teaching pathway for individual students. To carry out the ERIK program, without administering the assessment profile, would greatly interfere with the integrity of the intervention.
The initial ERIK research randomly placed students into one of the three teaching programs, identifying that students made good progress. However, in the second phase of the research, when students were placed into their identified teaching pathway, using the ERIK assessment profile, student’s made significantly more gains.
The assessment profile provides teachers with the baseline data against which progress can be measured i.e. “response to intervention” data. If we have no baseline data, teachers will not know if the program has had the desired effect.
Every effort has been made to reduce the time taken to administer the assessment profile (pre-testing). Administration time has been reduced to 35 minutes per student. Benefits of administering the assessment outweigh the assumed time benefits of disregarding the assessment. In the long run it saves time by placing the student into the most appropriate program, as the student will make gain faster.
Intervention Integrity also extends to the administration of the review sessions.The purpose of the review sessions is for ongoing monitoring of student progress. The data collected in the review sessions should be used to ascertain if the student is continuing to make progress and for evidence for discontinuance. There is no sense in continuing a student for the entire 60 sessions if they are not continuing to make progress or they are finding the program too easy.
Intervention Integrity, the degree to which an intervention is implemented as intended (Gresham, 1989). If an intervention is not implemented as intended then it cannot be known whether intervention outcomes were a result of the intervention.
References:
Gresham, F.M. (1989). Assessment of treatment integrity in school consultation and prereferral intervention. School Psychology Review, 18, 37-50.
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) 2004. Available at: