The Effects of a Response Card Intervention on the Active Participation in Math Lessons of Five Seventh Graders with Learning Disabilities – Jennifer Karnes

Academic learning as well as teaching are interactive moments, where the teacher has to ensure that students grasp the shared knowledge (Parsons, Nu- land, & Parsons, 2014).

A scientific approach to teaching, that enables educators to increase their effectiveness and efficiency in sharing skills and knowledge with their students across levels, is the Interactive Direct Instruction (Engelmann, 2017). Direct Instruction means that a concrete introduction of information is followed by ongoing, brisk practice that includes immediate feedback (Watkins & Slocum, 2004). One well-researched method to increase students’ opportunities to participate is choral responding, where students verbally answer to teachers questions together (Haydon, Marsicano, & Scott, 2013; Owiny, Spriggs, Sartini, & Mills, 2018).

Expanded by response cards, this method is almost unlimited. The diverse formats for using response cards provide teachers and students great flexibility in terms of active participation in class.

Research supports effects using response cards in several school settings: for instance, in inclusive classrooms concerning students with or without special educational needs (Duchaine, Jolivette, Fredrick & Alberto, 2018; Haydon, Richmond Mancil, & Van Loan, 2009; Narayan, Heward, Gardner, Courson, & Omness, 1990), in elementary school (Bondy & Tincani, 2018; Christle & Schuster, 2003), on secondary level (Adamson & Lewis 2017; Blood, 2010; Duchaine et al., 2018; George, 2010) as well as regarding different subjects like math (Adamson & Lewis, 2017; Christle & Schuster, 2003; Duchaine et al., 2018), science (Duchaine et al., 2018), social studies (Blood, 2010; George, 2010) and writing (Davis & O’Neil, 2004).

Therefore, this single-case study was conducted to examine the effects of a simple response cards treatment on engaging low performing students with a Learning Disability during math lessons. An ABA reversal across-subjects design was applied to demonstrate the causal relation between intervention and expected results. Five students from a seventh-grade classroom were observed during hand-raising and response-card conditions to identify the effects of response cards on their responding and test scores. The intervention successfully increased the participation and performance as the results indicated. All participants benefited significantly from this way of actively engaging students. The critical discussion of the results includes an outlook on future research challenges.

Jennifer Karnes
University of Cologne