Teaching foundational skills using strategic incremental rehearsal: Investigating effectiveness across varying school agents

Abstract Strategic incremental rehearsal (SIR) is an efficacious flashcard intervention shown to improve foundational skill acquisition. However, there is limited research examining the feasibility and effectiveness of SIR when used by school‐based implementers. We present two studies to address this limitation. Study 1 examined the effects of SIR implemented by teachers on the acquisition of grapheme‐phoneme correspondences with three at‐risk kindergarteners. Study 2 examined the effects of SIR implemented by a same‐age peer on the acquisition and fluency of addition math facts with 3 second‐grade students receiving special education services. Overall, both studies point to the effectiveness of using SIR with students requiring intensive intervention in an focused, short timeframe. The effectiveness of SIR is particularly salient given that teachers and peers were able to implement SIR with high treatment integrity and effectively improve outcomes for students with and at risk for disabilities.