This study employed an A-B-A-B design to examine engagement and active participation among five middle school students with emotional/behavioral disorders (EBD) while using response cards for mathematics instruction. Students with EBD often exhibit off-task behaviors, which limit their engagement with classroom learning. This is of concern as students with EBD tend to have lower academic achievement compared with their peers and have shown a marked decline particularly in mathematics performance as they move from the elementary into secondary grades. When students have increased opportunities to respond (OTR)—through methods such as response cards—they are more likely to be engaged with and actively participate in instruction. In the baseline phase, students participated by traditional hand-raising. The intervention phase introduced the use of response cards. Visual analyses reveal that response cards increased the engagement of all participants. Findings were translated into the between-case standardized mean difference effect size estimates and the effect size was 1.3, suggesting that response cards may be an inexpensive and easily implemented method for increasing OTR for students with EBD.
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