For the last decade, educators have been directed to use evidence-based practices in their classrooms. However, despite this direction, the use of these practices is not widespread in many classrooms. Though many resources exist to help educators locate and select these practices educators face barriers which make these practices infeasible or…

The collection of student data through screening and progress monitoring of social and emotional learning (SEL) skills is just as important as the implementation of curriculum and practices. Monitoring skill acquisition allows teachers to identify effective practices, provide intervention, and intensify support for students who need it. In this…

Data-based individualization (DBI) is a framework that allows educators to make timely and informed decisions about student progress in academics or behavior. In this article, we focus on the DBI framework as applied to math intervention within a tiered support model for students experiencing math difficulty. We review how DBI starts with an…

Design review sessions are commonly used in real-world design. Design review sessions are also common in undergraduate engineering education to help reveal students' decision-making processes necessary for informed design (Adams and Siddiqui 2016). Through design reviews, educators examine student reasoning, progress, and provide feedback as…

It is clear that young people bore the brunt of the pandemic's impact. Disrupted learning, sometimes stretching for two years, forced many students off track and behind academically. Leaders are now faced an unprecedented need to make smart investments with federal relief funds in efforts that accelerate student learning. District leaders should…

Community-based instruction (CBI) is one type of community experience in which students with disabilities work toward instructional goals while engaged in activities occurring in a natural environment outside of a typical school setting (Hoover, 2016; Rowe et al., 2015). Educators who implement CBI capitalize on their students' time in the…

This brief highlights how to use culturally and linguistically aligned (CLA) strategies to support multilingual learners within an multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) framework including how to use a CLA lens to inform instructional adaptations for multilingual learners who require intensive intervention. The brief reviews the use of the CLA…

Bayesian analysts use informed priors to improve analytic precision and prediction; however, rarely have they applied a mixed methods approach that uses qualitative data to develop these priors. Yet, using qualitatively informed priors can be useful when making predictions in the context of small sample sizes, which is common in school-based…

The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) implemented Results Driven Accountability (RDA) in 2014 to help improve the educational outcomes of students with disabilities. As part of RDA, states were required to develop a State Systemic Improvement Plan (SSIP), which is a comprehensive, multi-year plan designed…

Implementing evidence-based practices requires not only knowledge of various interventions and practices but also professional judgment in selecting and applying an intervention that best meets the needs of the child and the family. Previous work on decision-making in evidence-based practices has focused on describing evidence-based practices, how…

Assessment is fundamental to school psychology, but its purpose has shifted from making predictions about children to improving outcomes for children. This commentary on the special issue focuses on screening and progress-monitoring decisions that can be used to solve student problems. We outline several psychometric and practical issues that…

Check-in/check-out (CICO) is a well-established Tier 2 intervention to address at-risk student behavior problems. Despite its widespread empirical support and applied use, CICO can be taxing for teachers to implement when there is insufficient time available and teacher self-efficacy in addressing behavior problems is low. Evaluation of CICO is…

Reading proficiency is fundamental to school success. However, up to 50% of students with reading disabilities are not making adequate progress. Students who demonstrate persistent and severe reading difficulties require increasingly intensive instruction individualized to meet their instructional needs Individualizing instruction with…

Special education administrators at both the district and school level are serving in critical roles that uniquely position them to improve academic and behavioral outcomes of students with disabilities by ensuring the special education teachers under their supervision are prepared to deliver an evidence-based form of intensive…

The recommendations in this brief create a framework for using data effectively to make instructional decisions. The availability of student-level data for educators has pushed forward the movement to strengthen the role of data to guide instruction and improve student learning. While improvements in technology and assessments, as well as recent…