ABSTRACT

The long-term goal of educational intervention research is to provide practitioners with interventions that produce desired student outcomes and are feasible to use in common educational settings. Ideally, researchers will also determine what level of implementation is needed to achieve the desired outcomes and establish that it is feasible for educators to implement. Historically, researchers have taken great care to measure outcomes (i.e. dependent variables) with reliability and validity. Increasingly, we are recognizing the need for the intervention (i.e. independent variable) (Gresham, 2014) to be carefully measured as well. Treatment fidelity is a term commonly used in educational research to describe assessment of the independent variable. Defining and sensitively measuring implementation of interventions is complex and researchers are constrained by the availability of appropriate personnel, fiscal resources, and time limits (Spillane et al., 2007; Munter et al., 2014), but necessary to determine (a) whether non-significance is due to failure of the theory or inadequate implementation, (b) the degree of implementation that is required to achieve desired outcomes, and (c) the feasibility of adequate implementation in an authentic setting by practitioners.