Interobserver

Participant and Setting The participant was a six-year-old, first grade female named Mary. Mary did not have any diagnosed disabilities. She attended a private school Monday thru Friday for an average of 35 hours per week. While at school, Mary participated in an in-school tutoring program for students identified by their teacher as struggling readers. The in-school tutoring occurred twice a week for one hour each day. In addition, Mary’s parents paid for her to go to private tutoring for five hours a week with sessions ranging for 1.5 hours to 2 hours. There were three sessions per week.
At the beginning of this study, Mary’s mid-year fluency rate was 12 words correct per minute (WCPM). The average first grader reads 30 WCPM at mid-year …show more content…
These recordings were used for the sole purpose of interobserver agreement (IOA). When the researcher was listening to the records, they had the same paper the tutor used to document the misread words. Interobserver agreement was computed by dividing the number of agreements (words read correctly and words read incorrectly) by the total number of words in the text. The total number of words represented the total possible agreements and disagreements. The agreement between the tutor and researcher was 100%. The IOA was conducted for 50% of the sessions (12 sessions). Treatment integrity was calculated by independent observers listening to the audio recording of the sessions and being provided with a checklist outlining the procedures. The checklist described each step in sequential order of each condition. The observer recorded whether that step was implemented appropriately. The independent observers evaluated 20 sessions (83%) of the total 24 sessions for integrity. Based on the audio recording and the checklist, the independent observers rated the procedures were implemented correctly with an average of 97% of the time with a range from 83% to