Increasing the Active Supervision of Inclusive Early Childhood Education Pre-Service Teachers Using Goal Setting and Step Counters

Abstract

A reversal design (i.e., ABAB) was used to examine whether increasing steps correlate with higher levels of student interactions. Furthermore, does allowing educators to monitor their steps and set step goals enhance the potential for intervention adoption and lead to lasting teacher behavior change? Each pre-service inclusive early childhood special education teachers were in the final year of their preparation program, during their student teaching practicum. The study took place in two public k-5 elementary schools situated in a mid-size city (approximately 52K in population) in the Southern United States. In addition to visual analysis procedures, nonoverlap of all pairs was used to assess overlap, and Tau-U were used to calculate effect size. The research questions were: (1) Does goal setting and step counting increase the physical steps taken by educators during instruction?; 2) Is there a functional relation between steps taken and teacher-student interactions?; and (3) Are step increases a socially valid approach for increasing teacher-student engagement? Although the results point to minor (positive) effects on teacher steps, the data's variability prevents us from drawing conclusions about the relationship between independent and dependent variables. Nonetheless, when comparing baseline levels to MSI behaviors, we can observe meaningful shifts in a therapeutic direction in the MSI data.. Implications for research and practices are also presented.