Many barriers to effective evidence-based intervention implementation exist in K-12 settings, especially the lack of time and resources, highlighting the need for effective and feasible interventions. Despite its promising effectiveness and feasibility advantages, video peer modeling to date has not been systematically reviewed to provide evidence-based guidance for school practitioners and researchers. The present study fills this gap by reviewing extant empirical studies that examined video peer modeling applied in K-12 settings. Thirty studies that met the inclusion criteria were summarized by their (a) intervention dosage, (b) intervention components, (c) target skill areas, (d) skill-specific effectiveness, and (e) methodological quality. Results suggest that video peer modeling typically involves several components in addition to video-viewing, including verbal reinforcement, tangible reinforcement, prompting, explicit instruction, feedback, self-monitoring, and visual aids. Results also suggest that, across academic, social-emotional-behavioral, and adaptive domains, video peer modeling shows promising effectiveness in improving a wide range of skills in schools.
Despite consensus in the mathematics education literature regarding the mutually dependent components of math proficiency, as well as the importance of their development, most elementary-aged students in the United States demonstrate a lack of proficiency in math according to national assessment data. Whole number knowledge, which includes skills in computation and word-problem solving, is understood to be a critical foundation for the development of later math skills. This study used a multiple-baseline experimental design to evaluate the impacts of an evidence-based mathematics intervention, Accelerating Mathematics Performance with Practice Strategies (AMPPS), on third- through fifth-grade students' skills with complex computation, as well as on their word-problem-solving performance. Furthermore, we evaluated effects on students' math self-concept. Five students identified to have difficulties in math received AMPPS in a one-on-one, in-person format. The results of the study were mixed. For example, when using visual analyses as our primary analytic method, these analyses did not show robust intervention effects on students' computation skills but did show at least some improvement for most students' word-problem-solving skills. Additionally, supplemental analyses comparing student growth to national and school-based norms suggested that all participants seemed to benefit from the intervention, but these analyses were not intended to examine experimental causality. Despite study limitations and a lower than optimal number of AMPPS sessions (dosage) provided to students, the present study offers several directions for future research, as well as possible implications for practitioners regarding intervention selection, intensity, and evaluation. The findings will also be discussed in the context of conducting systematic replication studies, which are essential for understanding the generality of a given phenomenon (e.g., an effect of a school-based intervention) across a wide range of situations and conditions.
School Psychology is an outlet for research on children, youth, educators, and families that has scientific, practice, and policy implications for education and educational systems. In this editorial, a summary of the last 5 years is provided regarding journal impact and use, award winners, special topics, and editorial leadership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
Given the number of students demonstrating math difficulties nationally, efforts to optimize instruction and intervention strategies to maximize schools' resources (e.g., personnel, time) are necessary. One method to increase practice opportunities and flexibility for educators is to space instruction across the day. We employed a randomized controlled trial to evaluate whether different practice schedules would impact the short- and long-term effects of a classwide Cover-Copy-Compare math intervention targeting simple and complex math computation problems. We also investigated whether students' average number of opportunities to respond, teachers' ratings of intervention usability, and students' ratings of treatment acceptability differed across the randomly assigned conditions. Thirteen classrooms from two school districts in the Southeast participated. The total dosage per day was held constant across conditions. When compared to students who practiced math facts during one session, students who participated in two or three practice sessions spaced throughout the day had higher math performance on simple computation problems (i.e., subtraction) after a four-week follow-up (g = 0.15 to g = 0.36). Students who practiced math facts during one 10-min session had higher performance on complex computation (i.e., 2 × 2 subtraction) problems (g = -0.30 to g = 0.11) in comparison to students who participated in two or three sessions. Teachers and students perceived the overall intervention and procedures to be acceptable with some variability across grade and condition. Implications for research and practice are discussed with recommendations for educators to consider when designing effective instructional tasks.
For schools implementing Response-to-Intervention, it is important to understand how to efficiently intensify interventions. Treatment intensity, or intervention design, is a critical yet overlooked and understudied aspect in math. More frequent dosage results in greater student gains. However, questions remain regarding how teaching episodes impacts student outcomes. Limited reporting of these variables leads to questions regarding recommendations for intervention dosage or number of teaching episodes. This exploratory study used an adapted alternating treatment design to document the number of teaching episodes, calculate cumulative intensity, and evaluate the learning rate of a Cover-Copy-Compare intervention across three dosages. Results indicate that learning rates were the greatest during the smallest treatment dosage for most students. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Despite extensive research suggesting the importance of students developing strong foundational math skills during early grades, more than 60% of 4th graders in the United States lack proficiency in mathematics. Such data are influenced by several factors, including summer learning loss in math, negative impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, and a need for more research on intervention programs for elementary-aged students experiencing difficulties in math. The goal of the present study was to use a multiple-baseline experimental design to evaluate the Accelerating Mathematics Performance with Practice Strategies (AMPPS) program when implemented one-on-one, virtually, and during the summer with second- and third-grade students experiencing math difficulties. Overall, results showed that all students: (a) improved their addition and subtraction fluency during the AMPPS intervention phase, but three of the four participants showed relatively stronger gains; and (b) found AMPPS to be an acceptable intervention when used virtually during the summer. Findings are discussed within the context of summer learning, COVID-19, and potential opportunities to benefit from interventionists' virtual implementation of evidence-based math programs.
School Psychology is an outlet for research on children, youth, educators, and families that has scientific, practice, and policy implications for education and educational systems. In this editorial, annual updates are provided regarding journal impact, award winners, special topics, and editorial leadership, as well as reflections on how the journal engages in the open science process to promote transparency, rigor, and reproducibility in the science produced in the field of school psychology.
Preschool students’ mastery of early numeracy skills is important, so they enter kindergarten with the necessary prerequisite skills, which are predictive of achievement in later elementary grades. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) instructional package on the foundational early numeracy skills of three preschool students. A multiple baseline across participants design was employed. Treatment sessions were 15 to 20 minutes long and held twice a week. The primary outcome variable was a measure of match quantity, and the generalization outcome variable was a measure of number sequencing. Results indicate that CRA was effective for increasing the match quantity fluency skills of two of three participants; however, the effects did not generalize to number sequencing.
Although many students experience math anxiety in school, the contexts in which it occurs are not well-understood. Increased understanding of the environmental situations that might elicit math anxiety is needed to better support students' math achievement. Using a within-subjects design, we examined differences in math anxiety and math performance across math task timing (i.e., overt timing vs. covert timing) and math task complexity (i.e., simple vs. complex problems) with 113 fourth- (n = 38) and fifth-grade (n = 75) students. ANCOVA results showed no significant differences in participant reporting of math anxiety between overt and covert timing conditions for both simple (p = .27) and complex problems (p = .42). However, participants reported higher levels of math anxiety when working on complex math tasks compared to working on simple math tasks (p = .01). Findings also showed that participants with medium to high baseline math anxiety were more likely to report higher levels of math anxiety when completing complex math problems under the covert timing condition, p = .02, η2 = 0.13. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.
Intergenerational tutoring programs can leverage technology to address the instructional needs of students. This study describes a novel online intergenerational tutoring program designed to target kindergarten students' literacy skills. Older adult volunteers delivered evidence-based instructional strategies via Zoom. The study used a two-group, quasi-experimental design with students assigned to an intervention (n = 23) or waitlist control (n = 18) group. Five early literacy fluency skills were measured (letter naming, letter sound, phoneme segmentation, nonsense word, and real word). Tutors implemented the program with high fidelity. At posttest, the intervention group scored higher than the control group on each of the five skills and the group differences were statistically significant with a medium effect size for letter sound fluency and nonsense word fluency. Both tutors and parents reported high program acceptability. This study demonstrated how older adults can use online technology to disseminate evidence-based instructional interventions to children.
This study extends prior research by manipulating both intervention and skill difficulty using a multiple baseline across participants design with changing phases in a virtual tutoring environment. Participants included four students from third and fifth grades for whom appropriate and challenging instructional targets were selected following diagnostic assessment using curriculum-based measurement. Instructional strategies were selected to align or misalign with those instructional targets. The multiple baseline design was used to determine the functional relationship between the instructional strategies (acquisition or fluency-building) with appropriate and challenging skills. Results suggested that indicated intervention strategies aligned with students' skill proficiency resulted in improvements but that contraindicated intervention strategies that were misaligned with students' skill proficiency did not. Furthermore, most students rated the contraindicated intervention strategies as less acceptable or reported higher levels of math anxiety.
Despite the robust correlation between math anxiety and math performance, little is known about how students' perceptions of math task difficulty or employment of math strategies may relate to math task types. The purpose of this study was to examine differences in students' task difficulty perceptions and math strategy use across types of math tasks (i.e., overtly or covertly timed, simple or complex problems). Participants included 113 fourth- and fifth-grade students who completed four study conditions in a randomized, counterbalanced order in which tasks varied in terms of timing (i.e., covert or overt) and task difficulty (simple or complex computation). Students demonstrated small to medium differences in task difficulty perceptions and strategy use across their baseline trait math anxiety and math performance such that students with higher trait math anxiety reported using more strategies and tasks being more difficult. Generally, math task timing did not affect perceived difficulty or strategy use. Implications for research and practice are discussed.Impact StatementStudent perceptions of math tasks and the strategies they employ can affect their math performance and engagement with math, which in turn can impact future math performance. Of note in this study, fourth- and fifth-grade students with math difficulties and high initial math anxiety demonstrated better math performance and lower perceived task difficulty under overtly timed conditions, underscoring the utility of timing for math fluency performance, particularly for students with math difficulties.
While an abundance of evidence-based mathematics interventions are available to support students' mathematics fluency, research suggests that they are not often implemented within schools. Moreover, national data suggests that most students in the United States are not meeting grade level expectations in mathematics. This underperformance coupled with limited implementation of evidence-based practices emphasizes the need to provide schools with effective, efficient, and resource friendly interventions to support students' mathematics achievement. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of reciprocal peer tutoring, iPad delivered flashcards, and a combined intervention condition on the multiplication fluency of 72 third grade students enrolled in two public schools in the midwestern region of the United States using a randomized pretest-posttest design. Students received 10 min of intervention after their core instruction 4 days per week for 5 weeks. Results suggest that there were few differences between treatment groups on both proximal and distal measures. Moreover, all groups demonstrated significant growth from pre- to posttest on proximal measures. Assessment response rates across modalities and student engagement are discussed along with implications for research and practice. Students across all treatment groups (peer tutoring, iPad flashcards, and a combined intervention) improved their multiplication fact fluency.There were few differences between groups at posttest on proximal measures of multiplication fluency and distal measures of math achievement between groups.Students across treatment groups scored consistently higher in digits correct per minute when completing the paper-pencil curriculum-based measure (CBM) compared with the iPad CBM.
School Psychology is an outlet for research on children, youth, educators, and families that has scientific, practice, and policy implications for education and educational systems. In this editorial, annual updates are provided regarding journal impact, special topics, and editorial leadership, as well as reflections on how the journal engages social justice and antiracism through dynamic review and revision to ensure equity, diversity, and inclusion in the editorial process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
Conceptual and procedural instruction order may affect students' learning and generalization of math skills. This study compared two instruction sequences, concepts-first and iterative, and their effect on fraction performance through a class-wide intervention. Fourth-grade students (N = 114) were randomly assigned to the concepts-first, iterative, or control group. The primary conceptual assessment showed that the iterative and concepts-first groups performed similarly, demonstrating medium effect sizes compared with control. The primary procedural assessment again demonstrated that both intervention groups outperformed the control, this time with large to very large effects. In addition, the iterative group outscored the concepts-first group with a medium effect size, though it was not statistically significant. Generalization assessments measuring skill transfer found no differential effects. Overall, iterative instruction was at least as effective as a concepts-first sequence during a fraction intervention.
The purpose of this meta-analysis was to examine the impact of school-based therapeutic and math skill interventions on math anxiety symptoms and math achievement among K-12 students. Potential moderators included treatment type and study quality. A systematic search yielded 17 included studies representing 1786 primary and secondary students. The results suggested that therapeutic interventions reduced math anxiety symptoms (gav = -0.51) better than math skill interventions (gav = -0.32) and math skill interventions improved math achievement (gav = 0.76) more than therapeutic interventions (gav = 0.12). Moderator analysis indicated that when accounting for study quality, the differences between intervention type were not significant for either of the outcome measures (i.e., achievement and math anxiety). Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
This meta-analysis examined the validity of curriculum-based measures in mathematics (CBM-M) in relation to mathematics outcomes. Peer reviewed journal articles or dissertations were included if participants were in Grades 2 to 8 and the study purpose was examining the criterion validity of MCOMP and MCAP. Studies were identified via electronic databases, table of contents review, and reference and forward citation searches. Twenty-nine studies with 27,907 participants met inclusion criteria. A random-effects three-level meta-analysis of 328 correlations was conducted to estimate the average correlations between scores on the CBM-M tasks and criterion measures and to analyze the effects of potential moderating variables. The average correlation between CBM-M and criterion measures was r =.584 [95% CI: 533, .635]. Both MCAP (r =.654 [95% CI: .599, .703]) and MCOMP (r =.528 [95% CI: .462, .590]) scores were strongly correlated with criterion measures when all grades were included. Moderator analyses were conducted for each CBM-M task, yielding similar findings. Average correlations were stronger for middle compared to elementary grades and for concurrent administration of CBM-M and criterion measures. No moderating effects were found for criterion, CBM-M developer, or time of year the CBM-M task was administered. No evidence of publication bias was found.Impact StatementThis meta-analysis indicates that MCOMP and MCAP are strong predictors of mathematics achievement and thus useful for universal screening. Stronger correlations were found for middle school students as well as when the CBM-M task and the criterion measure were administered within one month or less of one another.