| The involvement of the learner has been shown to be important in academic achievement. Recently, several methods of increasing active student responding have been explored to increase academic scores, including response boards (or cards) and choral responding. Response boards are individual dry-erase boards used by each student to write answers to teacher's questions.;The previous research on response boards has not addressed the issue of student behavior. Teachers, especially in special education classrooms, are continually looking for methods to improve student behavior. The present study examines the use of response boards on student behaviors and academic measures for students in two special education classrooms.;Three students in a Varying Exceptionalities (VE) classroom and four students in a class for Emotionally Handicapped (EH) students were subjects in this study. In addition to student behaviors and academic measures, independent variable integrity and social validity measures were assessed in an alternating treatments design comparing response boards to a traditional hand-raising condition.;The results indicated that students were more on-task in the response board condition. There were no clear differences in disruptive behavior. The students in the VE classroom showed an increase in academic measures and learning efficiency. The teachers showed a slight tendency to provide more positive comments during the response board condition. The teachers and students made overwhelmingly positive comments about the response boards. The results are discussed in terms of the behavioral improvement, academic gains, and previous research on active student responding. |
