Incremental Rehearsal: A Flash-Card Intervention to Build Basic Skills

Today, I want to talk about one of my personal favorite interventions for building basic skills: Incremental Rehearsal. Below, I hope to present all of the information that any teacher or interventionist would need in order to implement this intervention if so desired.

Overview
Incremental Rehearsal* (IR) is a flash-card drill intervention designed to foster mastery and fluency of information retrieval. By combining a low number of new cards with a high volume of known cards (a 1:9 ratio), this intervention provides a high frequency of exposure to target information and provides multiple opportunities for success. By using cards containing information the student already knows, this intervention allows the student to gain momentum and gain motivation through repeated success.

*Note: the link above describes a math intervention using IR. However, IR is also appropriate for various reading skills.

Skills Reading Targeted

• Letter Identification
• Letter-Sound Identification/Phonics
• Sight-Word Identification
• Vocabulary (more advanced skill)

Above are listed several different possibilities for the information targeted by IR. However, IR can be appropriate for building any skill requiring rote memorization of information, including math concepts, history information, etc. (Bunn et al., 2005).

Alternative Ratio
As stated, IR uses a 1:9 unknown to known ratio. This is not the only type of flashcard drill intervention used. Another very popular style of flash-card drill is:

• Drill Sandwich - 3:7 unknown to known ratio in which known and unknown cards are alternately presented.

I wanted to briefly present this type of drill to let you know that the ratio is somewhat flexible and I will talk about comparing these two styles later on in this post.

Progress Monitoring Probes

The type of probe that should be used with IR is dependent on the skill being targeted. Get creative with this. However, since the goal is to build fluency of basic skills (the groundwork for more advanced reading), progress monitoring should deal specifically with those basic skills and not assess more advanced skills (i.e., do not use fluency or comprehension probes if you're teaching sight word identification). 

• Sight-Words: If sight-words are being targeted, probes that provide students with a random set of sight-words from the dolch word list could be used (A word list generator can be found here). alternatively, if you use word walls, the word wall words can be used instead. 
• Letter-Name Fluency: If letter-name identification is being targeted, probes that provide students with a randomize list of letters could be used (A probe generator can be found here)

Other early reading/basic skills probes can be found through DIBELS and EasyCBM.

If you would like, you could also give the student a short reading passage containing the words being drilled in order to check if the skills are generalizing to more natural reading exercises. This should not be done as a primary progress monitoring assessment, but can be useful to know when it comes time to make decisions regarding the intervention. This could be done anywhere from once per week to once per month.

Progress Monitoring Frequency

Progress monitoring for this intervention should take place at least once per week. However, due to the simple nature of the probes for the targeted basic skills, progress monitoring can easily occur at the end of every intervention session, which would provide the most accurate data regarding the student's progress.

Materials Needed

The incremental rehearsal intervention is relatively low-cost with regards to physical materials needed, making it particularly ideal in settings in which budget concerns may be an issue.

• Index Cards (for making flashcards)
• Stopwatch
• Progress Monitoring Probes
• Deck Chart/Progress Chart*
• Pen

*Personal recommendation

Recommended Frequency/Duration

Though the logistics of the intervention can be flexible and depends on your school's policies and schedules, I would recommend that this intervention meet for a minimum of 20 minutes per session, 3 days per week. The duration of the intervention as a whole depends on the information being targeted, but the intervention should last no shorter than 6-8 weeks, with a formative assessment occurring at 3-4 weeks, at which time it can be determined if changes need to occur. 

Preparing for the Intervention

After establishing baseline (discussed in a previous post), the first real step is to determine what is known and what is unknown.This is done by presenting each target item (letter, word, etc.) in a random order. Items correctly identified within 2 seconds are considered known. Then, sort the cards into "known" and "unknown" piles. Note: If fewer than 8 items are "known," other information that the student knows can be substituted (colors, shapes, etc.). Then, take 1 card from the "unknown" pile and 8-9 cards from the "known" pile to create the rehearsal deck. After making the rehearsal deck, you are ready to go.

Personal Recommendation: write down all of the items in the rehearsal deck onto a little chart and the date the initial deck was created. Make sure the 1 unknown card is the last on the list of the rehearsal deck. After the items included on the rehearsal deck, continue entering items that still need to be known onto the chart. This will allow you to keep track of how much still needs to be learned and when items entered the deck.

Running the Intervention

Here are the steps to actually executing the intervention with fidelity:

1. Present "unknown" item and immediately provide correct answer --> have student repeat the answer
2. Present flashcards in the following sequence:
1. UK (unknown) - K1 (first known)
2. UK - K1 - K2
3. UK - K1 - K2 - K3
4. (etc. until reaching the unknown followed by all known cards)
3. Then, present unknown item to see if the student can respond accurately within 2 seconds
1. If no, repeat sequence
2. If yes, UK becomes K1, select a new UK item, and the final known card is removed

That last step is the reason why keeping the chart can be so helpful, since it allows you to track which cards have been in the deck the longest and should then be the next to be discarded. By doing this, it ensures the unknown card stays in the deck long after it has become known, providing additional exposure and over-learning, which helps foster mastery. Here is a little diagram I created to help show the intervention:

The Research Base

As always, interventions need to be evidence-based. So what does the evidence say? I won't go too deep into it, but I wanted to go over a couple of studies. First, a meta-analysis summarized and analyzed the results of 12 different studies investigating the effectiveness of IR. Their results found that IR consistently resulted in significant gains in information compared to controls. They concluded that IR was most appropriate for students who have severe disabilities (thus needing more exposure/repetition) and when the information is more basic and necessary for more advanced skills (Burns et al., 2012). 

Compared to Drill Sandwich interventions, some evidence suggests IR results in a higher rate of word retention (Macquarrie et al., 2002), and there is also evidence to suggest that IR results in better generalization (i.e., sight-word intervention resulting in reading those words in natural sentences; Joseph et al., 2012). 

Finally, compared to other flashcard methods, one study suggests IR is the least correlated with measured IQ (Burns & Boice, 2009). What does this mean? IR would be expected to be just as effective for students regardless of their intellectual level, whereas the other drills did not work as well for the lower-functioning students compared to the typical or higher-functioning students. Therefore, it could reasonably be expected that IR will work with any student in need of assistance with basic skills. 

References

• Bunn, R., Burns, M. K., Hoffman, H. H., & Newman, C. L. (2005). Implementation guidelines: Using incremental rehearsal to teach letter identification to a preschool-age child. Journal of Evidence-Based Practices for Schools, 6(2), 134-136
• Burns, M. K. & Boice, C. H. (2009). Comparison of the relationship between words retained and intelligence for three instructional 
• Burns, M. K., Zaslofsky, A. F., Kanive, R., & Parker, D. C. (2012). Meta-analysis of incremental rehearsal using phi coefficients to compare single-case and group designs. Journal of Behavioral Education, 21, 185-202. DOI: 10.1007/s10864-012-9130-2
• Joseph, L., Eveleigh, E., Konrad, M., Keef, N., & Volpe, R. (2012). Comparison of the efficiency of two flashcard drill methods on children’s reading performance. Journal of Applied School Psychology, 28, 317-337. DOI: 10.1080/15377933.2012.66974
• MacQuarrie, L. L., Tucker, J. A., Burns, M.K., & Hartman, B. (2002). Comparison of retention rates using traditional, drill sandwich, and incremental rehearsal flash card methods. School Psychology Review, 31(4), 584-595.

Summary

IR is a versatile flashcard intervention that has a fairly strong evidence-base supporting it. It is relatively cost-effective and requires very minimal training to implement. By frequently presenting new information, this intervention over-teaches information to students, ensuring that it is mastered and can be fluently retrieved. As I said, this is one of my personal favorite interventions, as it fits really well with the behavioral perspective of repeatedly drilling information to facilitate retention. It also helps build the important basic skills that are the backbone of more complex reading skills. I hope you found this post informative and helpful. I will be back next time for yet another intervention. Until next time!