An Evaluation of the Effects of Graphic Aids in Improving Decision Accuracy in a Continuous Treatment Design

Educators, school psychologists, and other professionals must evaluate student progress and decide to continue, modify, or terminate instructional programs to ensure student success. For this purpose, progress-monitoring data are often collected, plotted graphically, and visually analyzed. The curre...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of behavioral education 2013-12, Vol.22 (4), p.283-301
Main Authors: Van Norman, Ethan R., Nelson, Peter M., Shin, Jae-Eun, Christ, Theodore J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic achievement
Accuracy
Applied Behavior Analysis
Behavior Patterns
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Child and School Psychology
Contour lines
Curricula
Data lines
Decision Making
Decision making models
Design evaluation
Educational psychology
Evaluation
Graphic design
Graphs
Learning and Instruction
Novices
Original Paper
Probability
Program Evaluation
Progress Monitoring
Psychology
Reading Fluency
Scatter plots
School Psychologists
Slope of a line
Student Development
Studies
Time series
Trend Analysis
Visual Aids
Visual materials
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Summary:Educators, school psychologists, and other professionals must evaluate student progress and decide to continue, modify, or terminate instructional programs to ensure student success. For this purpose, progress-monitoring data are often collected, plotted graphically, and visually analyzed. The current study evaluated the impact of three common formats for visual analysis (scatter plots, scatter plots with trend lines, and scatter plots with trend and aim lines) on the decision accuracy of 52 novice analysts. All participants viewed 18 time-series graphs that depicted student growth on a continuous metric (e.g., oral reading fluency). Participants rated each graph as depicting substantial progress, minimal progress, or no progress. The magnitude of the true slope for each graph was fixed to 3.00 (substantial progress), 0.75 (minimal progress), or 0 (no progress). Inferential analyses were used to determine the probability of a participant correctly identifying different magnitudes of trend in the presence of different visual aids (no visual aid, trend line, and trend line with aim line). The odds of correctly identifying trend were influenced by visual aid (p
ISSN:1053-0819
1573-3513
DOI:10.1007/s10864-013-9176-2