Question: module 3 dq 2 argument Deliah
Plavnick, and Ferreri (n.d) assert current legislation requires educational practices be informed by science. The effort to establish educational practices supported by science has, to date, emphasized experiments with large numbers of participants who are randomly assigned to an intervention or control condition. A potential limitation of such an emphasis at the expense of other research methods is that evidence-based practices in education will derive only from science in the hypothetico-deductive tradition. Such a process omits practices originating from and tested through an inductive approach to understanding phenomena. Single-case experimental designs, developed by experimental and applied behavior analysts, offer an inductive process to identify and alter the lawful relations between the behavior of individual organisms and the environmental variables that are causally related to the occurrence or nonoccurrence of the behavior. Hitchcock, Nastasi and Summerville (2010) posit one challenging is analyses of experimental studies often rely on visual rules. Visual analyses entail their own form of judgment (e.g., can researchers reliably identify when a baseline is stable, or if the data demonstrate a causal relationship, etc.). On the other hand, Plavnick, and Ferreri (n.d) argue a benefit of Single-Case Experimental Research Methodology (SCED) methods in educational environments is the adaptability and flexibility of the designs to better understand whom a particular practice is effective for, whom it is not effective for, and why details that get lost in the averaging of group outcomes. As educational programs and policies require increasing levels of individualization for all student populations (e.g., Response to Intervention, School Improvement Grants), the need for adaptive and flexible educational practices is more prevalent than perhaps it has ever been. As such, SCEDs can be used to provide a necessary complement to the more traditional between group methods for determining "what works" in education. This method of study does not relate to my study in any way, because this researcher's study is a qualitative phenomenological study.