Setting the stage: The importance of effective assessment for strategy instruction and self-regulation in implementation and research

Abstract

Strategy instruction is effective in supporting students with varying skill levels and abilities across subjects. Effective assessment is crucial when implementing strategy instruction as a means for supporting students on an individualized level. This introductory article to this special issue focuses on setting the stage for effective assessment through collaboration, the use of screeners and varied assessments, and ongoing monitoring. Each of these tenants are key to effective assessment for strategy instruction and allow implementation to best support student needs.

Keywords:

• Assessment
• collaboration
• progress monitoring
• screening
• strategy instruction

Strategy instruction is an approach designed to address difficulties in a variety of academic skills, including reading, writing, and math, as well as youth attitudes, beliefs, and motivation related to academic skills and proficiency, often referred to as self-regulation. Strategy instruction typically is scaffolded and taught to mastery while blending an academic focus with self-regulatory behavior use. For meaningful and impactful strategy instruction to occur, it is imperative that effective assessment be present to identify youth in need of additional supports and to measure youth responsiveness to the selected strategy instruction and supports. Strategy instruction has been successful in supporting a variety of students including those with and at-risk for both learning difficulties and challenging behaviors across disabilities, ages, and settings. One common barrier to effective strategy instruction is either the absence of effective, validated assessment or any assessment entirely. To meet the challenges presented by this barrier, educators should consider using screeners, both formal and informal assessments, ongoing progress monitoring, and collaboration with others throughout the assessment process; thus, ensuring it will be effective and feasible within school contexts.

Using screeners

To identify students who can benefit from strategy instruction with embedded explicit self-regulation instruction, it is important to use systematic screening methods to ensure all students who need additional supports can be appropriately and efficiently identified (Ennis et al., 2022). Universal systematic screening tools are brief assessments administered to every student in a school (or class) at predetermined times throughout the school year (Lane et al., 2014). It is strongly encouraged for schools to use multiple sources of data to identify students needing additional supports in the areas of reading, writing, and math as well as for behavioral and social-emotional learning skills. For example, schools should consider both academic and behavioral data as students with challenging behavior often struggle academically and students with academic deficits often engage in problem behaviors (Reid et al., 2004). As many schools have limited resources, they will want to intervene by focusing on students with needs in both areas first as these students are at greatest risk of pejorative outcomes without intervention (Scott et al., 2001). Further, students with challenging behaviors may benefit from the explicit self-regulation components (e.g., self-monitoring, self-reinforcement, self-instruction, goal setting) embedded within strategy instruction, such as those presented within the self-regulation strategy development (SRSD) instructional approach (Mason et al., 2012). With assessment data, it will be clearer what the student’s need are and how to better meet them.

Many commercially-available academic screening tools often focus on grade-level standards related to reading, writing, and math. While these screening tools offer a great starting point, additional data may be needed to understand students’ current level of performance on skills targeted for self-regulatory instruction. For example, once students are identified using schoolwide screening tools for not meeting benchmarks in reading, teachers may want to conduct additional, targeted assessments to look at a specific area of focus such as reading comprehension of nonfiction text (Ford et al., 2018). Similarly, if students are below benchmarks in writing, additional assessments may be needed to determine the student’s level of performance on a genre targeted for instruction (e.g., persuasive, expository). However, it is essential that additional assessments employed be brief and avoid potential assessment and/or performance fatigue (Ennis et al., 2014).

Varied assessment

When choosing assessments for use with strategy instruction, providing variety in the format and assessment outcomes can play an important role in the evaluation quality. There are a variety of modalities to measure and assess student progress of an academic goal, which should be aligned to the overall goal(s) of the strategy instruction. For example, if a teacher is using strategy instruction to teach persuasive writing to students, they may have a goal to improve paragraph structure (e.g., topic sentence, supporting details, conclusion sentence), as well as overall paragraph quality, necessitating two modes of evaluation. If strategy instruction was being used to address reading comprehension, then goals of identifying main ideas and supporting details may be required.

While strategy instruction typically targets specific academic skill(s) that should be assessed for progress, various assessments also should be included to evaluate beyond the proficiency of the skill. While understanding youth’s ability level in an academic skill (e.g., reading, writing, math) is important, it is equally important to consider the need for assessing student’s cognitive processes to determine if the strategy instruction changed their approach to the academic process.

In addition to evaluating the academic skill(s) taught through strategy instruction, evaluations should consider measuring other indicators such as student motivation, attitude, and beliefs (Harris et al., 2008). Changes in permanent productions, as well as student surveys (e.g., Intrinsic Motivation Inventory; McAuley et al., 1989), may demonstrate improvements in metrics beyond the academic skill targeted within the strategy instruction, necessitating future studies to incorporate other relevant metrics. As the teaching of self-regulation skills is frequently combined with strategy instruction to support independent use of the strategy, self-regulatory behaviors of students also should be assessed (e.g., Sanders et al., 2021).

Finally, researchers should consider adding student voice as a part of assessments. Student voice is frequently assessed through short social validity surveys (e.g., Children’s Intervention Rating Profile, CIRP; Witt & Elliott, 1985). Although surveys such as the CIRP are easy and time efficient to administer, focus groups and/or interviews can provide additional, valuable details into student understanding and acceptability of interventions and practices. The more detailed and richer the student reflection and feedback is, the more valuable the insight into student strategy use, academic readiness, and overall acceptability of the strategy, making focus groups and/or interviews valuable assessment tools to be used in assessing strategy instruction and subsequent use of the strategy by the student.

Ongoing monitoring

To assess the impact of strategy instruction, data should be collected at key times during instruction to guide future instruction and to track progress (Harris & Graham, 1996). Teachers can target future instruction to meet specific student needs by identifying what components of an academic skill students have mastered and what components students still need to guide scaffolded supports (Sanders et al., 2021). Additionally, once students demonstrate mastery of an academic skill, maintenance of that skill is rarely consistently and continuously assessed. It is common for maintenance of the skill to be assessed once or twice to determine if students retain the ability to independently perform the academic skill in question (e.g., Losinski et al., 2019). However, it is critical that maintenance assessments be provided over a longer period of time to determine if students retain mastery and use of the academic skill (Graham, 2006).

Collaboration

Collaboration is an important component of instruction both during the assessment process and when implementing strategy instruction with youth. Skills should be generalizable across environments and to be successful in the assessment of that generalization collaboration is key. Teachers and staff will want to collaborate during all parts of the process when using strategy instruction with youth. This includes during the instruction and assessment processes. Collaboration is an important tool when assessing youth because it lends itself to a variety of outcomes to assess in a variety of environments. Collaboration opens the door to environments for assessments outside of classroom walls. When other environments are accessible for assessing student skill, a better understanding of the generalization of those skills can present itself. This opens the door for various outcomes to be measured that reflect these more accessible environments providing educators a picture of the skills their students possess across outcome measures and environments. Collaboration is the push that opens the door to assessment of a variety of outcomes across a variety of environments within our schools. Also, while collaboration with other adults is key in the assessment process, peers should be included as co-evaluators in the assessment process. With some strategy instruction approaches, peers are partners in the learning process. When strategy instruction is assessed across content areas and collaboration is present during the assessment process, student abilities can be better determined without risking over-assessment and burnout while gaining understanding about youth strategy use and generalization abilities.

Special issue

Assessment is the cornerstone for the selection and implementation of any evidence-based practice or approach for students with academic and behavioral deficits or excesses. In this special issue, we provide four articles focused on different foci of effective assessment to inform strategy instructional approaches that addresses both academic and self-regulation challenges of students with and at-risk for disabilities. To anchor the special issue, Rollins, Sanders, Jolivette, and Virgin provide the findings from a literature review on the assessment approaches used in strategy instruction to improve reading comprehension and self-regulation skills. Their primary findings were a) assessments focused on the academic skill more than self-regulation skills, and b) oral retell was the most common mode of assessing comprehension.

To address how students are identified as needing strategy instruction, Ennis, Royer, & Hosp detail how academic and behavioral screeners can be used in this process. They provide a rationale for why the use of screeners are a valuable tool for educators—a means to determine, as soon as possible, students who may not be achieving proficiency in a skill or area as would be expected, and whom may need additional supports to be successful. Ennis et al. also provides examples of where to locate resources for valid screeners for classroom use as well as descriptions of academic and behavioral screeners for consideration. Since academic and behavioral instruction go hand-in-hand, so should, they argue, the use of screeners from which the data can pair academic strategy instruction with low-intensity behavioral strategies.

The final two articles focus on the critical skill and assessment areas of reading comprehension and writing skills, both considered gateway skills for success post-school and two areas in which the majority of students are not proficient. Sanders & Garwood focus on the area of reading comprehension and make links to student motivation as an influencer to overall proficiency in reading comprehension. They highlight two strategy instructional approaches, graphic organizers and self-regulated strategy development, which can promote student motivation in reading and subsequent reading comprehension. However, they call attention to the relation between student reading outcomes and the assessment of both student use of strategy instructional approaches and how reading comprehension is assessed. While Michael, Ray, & McKeown target writing skills experienced by many struggling writers and how strategy instruction can positively impact a student’s overall writing abilities. They describe how assessment of writing skills is critical, should be ongoing through purposeful progress monitoring, and offer several methods educators may consider.

Many of our students with and at-risk for disabilities struggle with both academic and self-regulation skills, it is critical that educators continue to work together in addressing both skill sets during the assessment and intervention processes. This special issue offers a variety of resources and ideas to do such within the lens of strategy instruction—assessment and implementation. By focusing on the areas of reading and writing, two areas of continued concern per proficiency outcome data, we address the comorbidity of skill attainment/usage and motivation/self-regulation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Loftin Michael

Elizabeth Michael Ph.D. is a clinical assistant professor at The University of Alabama. Her research interest includes equitable behavior and academic interventions for students with and at risk for emotional behavior disorders, interventions to support students writing skills, and implementation and assessment of social and emotional learning strategies for all students.

Robin Parks Ennis

Robin Parks Ennis Ph.D., BCBA-D is an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Ennis earned her doctoral degree from Georgia State University. Her research interests include academic, behavioral, and social/emotional interventions to support the needs of students with emotional and behavioral disorders.

Kristine Jolivette

Kristine Jolivette Ph.D. is the Paul W. Bryant and Mary Harmon Bryant Endowed Professor at the University of Alabama. Her research focus is on youth with and at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders, multi-tiered systems of support across domains, and adapted academic, social-emotional learning, and behavior tiered supports in juvenile corrections.

Sara Sanders

Sara Sanders Ed.D. is an assistant research professor at the University of Alabama. Her research focus is on academic, behavioral, and social- emotional interventions for students with emotional and behavioral disorders served in residential and juvenile justice facilities and the implementation of self-care supports for staff working in alternative education settings.