Background Information

Title:
QuickSmart: A basic academic skills intervention for middle school students with learning
difficulties

Full Article Citation:

Graham, L., Bellert, A., Thomas, J., & Pegg, J. (2007). QuickSmart: A basic academic skills
intervention for middle school students with learning difficulties. Journal of Learning Difficulties,
40(5), 410- 419.

Participant Characteristics
Describe the background characteristics of study participants (include the number of
participants, ages of participant, diagnoses and severity of delay, ethnicity, gender,
education level, socio-economic information, number of groups in the study, and any other
relevant information):
Eighty-four students in grades five, six and seven attending a school in a large rural town in
New South Wales were selected to participate in the QuickSmart intervention study (Graham,
Bellert, Thomas & Pegg, 2007). A total of forty-two students (18 girls and 20 boys) completed
the reading intervention program as well as, forty-two students (22 girls and 20 boys) were
involved in the mathematics program (Graham et al., 2007). The average age of the participants
was 11 years and 7 months (Graham et al., 2007). The authors stated that eleven of the students
were Indigenous Australians (Graham et al., 2007), but did not comment on the ethnicity of the
other participants.
The students were nominated by their teachers to participate in the QuickSmart intervention
study if they had low scores on statewide standardized testing (Graham et al., 2007). The
students were also selected if they exhibited persistent learning difficulties. Graham and
colleagues (2007) noted that some of the students had received interventions prior to their
involvement in the study.
Twenty students from the same schools were selected to be in the comparison group if they
were average- and high-achieving students (Graham et al., 2007). Ten of these students (5
average and 5 high achieving) constituted the comparison group for the mathematics intervention
(Graham et al., 2007). Similarly, ten students (5 average and 5 high achieving) provided a
reading intervention comparison group (Graham et al., 2007).

Number of participants who did not complete the study:

According to the data and description of the study, all students initially enrolled in the study
completed the requirements of the study.

Reasons given for not completing the study:

As stated earlier, the data and description of the study indicate that all students enrolled in the
study completed the requirements of the study.
Research Design
Describe the design of the study (e.g. group study, case study, focus group study, single
subject case study, cohort study, experimental study, quasi-experimental study, other):
This study meets the qualifications of a quasi-experimental study as the researchers did not
assigned participants to groups at random. Specifically, the researcher assigned students to either
the reading or math Quicksmart intervention group if they had low scores on their standardized
tests and they were identified as having learning difficulties. In addition, students were assigned
to the control group if they had average to high scores on their standardized tests.

Practice Characteristics
Describe the intervention?
The participants worked in groups of two students throughout the 26 weeks of structured
intervention activities (Graham et al., 2007). The intervention activities were delivered by an
experienced teacher or teacher’s aide under the supervision of a trained teacher and university
instructor (Graham et al., 2007). Each paired group participated in three 30 minute QuickSmart
sessions each week for the duration of the program (Graham et al., 2007).
The aim of the QuickSmart reading intervention program was to improve the speed of the
students’ word recognition, reading fluency, and comprehension skills (Graham et al., 2007). The
exercises given included timed flashcard activities taken from a target text, vocabulary activities,
repeated readings of the target text, comprehension strategies, reading games and testing of
selected tasks (Graham et al., 2007).
The aim of the mathematics intervention sessions was to improve the student’s ability to use
strategies and improve their automatic recall of basic number facts across all four operations
(Graham et al., 2007). Activities of the mathematics intervention program included timed recall
of basic number facts, extension number facts, opportunities to use strategies to calculate number
facts, guided problem solving as well as, testing of selected tasks (Graham et al., 2007).

Describe whether or not all participants received the intervention as described in the study:
Based on the data and description provided in the study, all participants received the
interventions as described in the study.

Outcomes
How were the results of the intervention measured?
In order to investigate the effects of the QuickSmart intervention program, Graham and his
colleagues (2007) compared reading and mathematics progress of the intervention group against a
group of 10 high-achieving and 10 average-achieving peers. They used the Progressive
Achievement Tests (PAT) and the Cognitive Aptitude Assessment System (CAAS), which both
utilize a pretest and posttest assessment. Graham et al., (2007) used the CAAS standardized
assessment to collect information about the students’ accuracy and retrieval times of basic
academic tasks and the PAT standardized assessment to provide data on students’ ability to
engage in more complex tasks such as mathematical problem solving and text comprehension.
According to Graham et al., (2007), semistructured exit interviews, observations, field notes, and
parent and teacher interviews were also used to corroborate the scores collected from the
standardized measures.

How often were they measured?

After each lesson, brief CAAS assessments on the particular skill were administered and an
overall pretest at the beginning of the intervention program and a posttest at the completion of the
intervention program, using both the PAT and the CAAS assessments were done.

Describe whether or not reliability and validity were measured, and, if so, how?
Graham et al., (2007) used the PAT and CAAS assessment measures, which are both
standardized tests. One of the advantages of using standardized tests is that the results can be
empirically documented and therefore the tests scores can be shown to have a relative degree of
validity and reliability.
However, the authors of this study (Graham et al., 2007) documented that they needed to
address concerns about external validity. They were concerned that their study may not be able to
be generalized from their unique, controlled test situation to other populations and conditions.
This may be because of the small sample size of the population with learning disabilities (42
students for the reading program and 42 students for the mathematics program), as well as the
small comparison sample of average and high average peers (5 students for the reading program
and 5 students for the mathematics program.). The authors of this study also based their
conclusions on pretest/posttest data and if cause-effect relationships can only be found when
pretests/posttests are carried out, and then this would also limit the generality, or external validity
of the findings.
Another concern with respect the psychometrics of the study was that Graham et al. (200&)
also felt that more rigorous statistical analyses were necessary. Hurlburt (1994) state that some
researchers feel that quasi-experimental designed experiments are not as statistically sound as true
experiments. The reasoning behind their argument follows that the evidence for causality in
quasi-experiments is less clear because the independent variable depends on naturally occurring
characteristics of the subjects (Hurlburt, 1994). However, Hurlburt (1994) states that there is no
statistical or computational difference between variables in the different experimental designs.

Synthesis Findings
Primary findings:
The purpose of the QuickSmart program was designed to improve the basic literacy and
numeracy skills of low-achieving middle-school students. The results from this study indicated
that the QuickSmart students improved significantly from pretest to posttest on both the PAT and
CAAS standardized assessment tools (Graham et al., 2007). Specifically the PAT assessment
data demonstrated individual improvements of up to 48 percentile points in the area of accuracy
and automaticity of basic skills (Graham et al., 2007). While the CAAS assessment data
demonstrated improvements of up to 28% in word recognition, improvements of up to 10% in
sentence comprehension tasks, and improvements of up to 5% in nonword tasks (Graham et al.,
2007). Overall, Graham and his colleagues (2007) found that students who participated in the
QuickSmart program were able to achieve speed and accuracy scores similar to their age-grade
peers.

Secondary findings:
According to Graham and colleagues (2007), an additional benefit from increasing students
automaticity in component skills through the QuickSmart targeted invention program, included
freeing up working memory space, which allowed students to focus their attention on more
complex tasks (van der Sluis, van der Leij, & de Jong, 2005, as cited in Graham et al., 2007).
Researchers (Graham et al., 2007; Van der Sluis et al., 2005) found that poor readers take more
time to decode words, and have more difficulty constructing meaning from text because their
limited working memory capacity is allocated almost entirely to decoding, and when that space
was freed up, it allowed students to complete more complex tasks such as reading comprehension
and problem solving.

Did any unanticipated positive or negative consequences result from the outcomes? What
were they?
An interesting negative consequence that occurred for the students, who did not participate in
the QuickSmart program, was that their scores actually decreased from pretest to posttest in the
area of mathematical fact retrieval and strategy use (Graham et al., 2007).

Are rival explanations plausible (e.g. history, maturation, testing, instrumentation, selection,
multiple treatment interference)?
The results obtained from Graham et al. (2007) contradict other research (Geary, 1996; Spear-
Swerling, 2005; Westwood, 2003 as cited in Graham et al., 2007) suggesting that the ability
to retrieve basic facts does not usually improve across the elementary school years for most
students with LD. We wonder if Graham et al. (2007) were able to obtain these positive results
because they only had two students per group taught by an experienced teacher or teacher’s aid
under the direction of a trained teacher and university instructor three times per week for 26
weeks? We are thinking that with the ratio of trained professional adults to students (3:2), you are
bound to have positive results, regardless of the program.

References

Graham, L., Bellert, A., Thomas, J., & Pegg, J. (2007). QuickSmart: A basic academic
skills intervention for middle school students with learning difficulties. Journal of Learning
Difficulties, 40(5), 410- 419.

Hurlburt, R. (1994). Comprehending behavioral statistics. CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing

Company.