Intensifying Instruction: A Conceptualization for Individualizing Effective Instruction

Definition

Intensifying instruction involves adapting alterable instructional variables to create a more individualized intervention from that which has been presented. Importantly, the intensified instruction is based on a reasoned hypothesis that it will be more effective than prior instruction.

1. Genesis and History

Historically, teachers have informally employed the concept of intensifying instruction every time they adapted their instruction to remediate a student’s academic achievement deficit. Nonetheless, in the United States, the concept of intensifying instruction formally gained prominence at the turn of the century because of federal legislation that directed schools to account for every student’s performance.

Passed by the United States Congress in 2001, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act increased school accountability by focusing on improving student outcomes. The law’s key features included requiring schools to conduct annual assessments in reading and mathematics in grades 3–8 and reporting the outcome data by subgroups according to race, socioeconomic status, and disability [1]. Subgroup scores served to prevent schools from portraying that their efforts were optimal for all students when the favorable scores of some students may have skewed the school’s aggregate average score higher while masking very suboptimal scores earned by other students. NCLB also required schools to show increased student performance from year to year, referred to as annual yearly progress. Sanctions were levied for schools that did not demonstrate sufficient annual growth, and they were required to submit school improvement plans [1]. The Every Student Succeeds Act replaced the No Child Left Behind Act in 2015, allowing schools more flexibility and agency while keeping in place NCLB’s core features of accountability, assessment mechanisms, and school improvement plans [2].

Shortly after the passage of the NCLB Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)—the federal education law that directs most special education services to students with disabilities in the nation’s public schools—was amended to align with NCLB while allowing schools to use the accompanying federal funds for two primary purposes. One purpose involved the continuation of individualized instruction for students with disabilities. A second purpose was new, which was to begin supporting supplemental early intervening services [3]. Both purposes further enshrined the need for schools to account for every student’s performance.

Under the IDEA, a student with a disability is someone whose disability necessitates special education. Special education is defined, in part, as specially designed instruction that meets the student’s unique needs. This instruction addresses the content to teach, the methodology for teaching it, the location where the services will be provided, their duration, and the service provider. According to a ruling by the United States Supreme Court, because of receiving these services, a student with a disability is to demonstrate progress annually that is appropriate considering their circumstances [4].

Regarding early intervening services, they comprise additional academic and behavioral supports to assist students who have not been identified as needing special education services but must have the supports to advance in the general education curriculum so that they do not eventually require special education. While early intervening services are available to students in kindergarten through 12th grade, emphasis is placed on students in kindergarten through grade 3 [5].

Due to the multifaceted federal legislative emphasis on school accountability for all students, mechanisms were created to enable schools to match their system of interventions to each student’s instructional needs. Chief among the mechanisms was an organizational scheme involving tiers that were described in terms of the types of interventions comprising them. Commonly, these schemes involve a three-tier framework [6]. While current frameworks address students’ academic and behavioral needs, the following brief explanation of a three-tier framework only addresses academics for the sake of clarity. Furthermore, although they are discussed here with respect to events in the United States, it must be said that similar tiered systems are implemented internationally.

Tier 1 involves high-quality instruction for teaching the core curriculum in the general education classroom. Data indicate this instruction will be effective for approximately 80% of students. The students who demonstrate an academic achievement deficit despite receiving this high-quality instruction will be provided with tier 2 services.

Tier 2, which data indicate will be effective with approximately 15% of students, comprises supplemental instruction to remediate students’ academic achievement deficits. When this occurs, the supplemental services will be discontinued, resulting in the student progressing in school with only tier 1 instruction.

Tier 3 services are also supplemental and are provided to students demonstrating significant, persistent performance deficits despite receiving tier 2 services. Estimates are that 3–5% of students will receive tier 3 services, which might be provided throughout their time in school [7].

Initially, one framework, referred to as response to intervention (RTI), was developed and used to address students’ academic achievement, particularly with respect to learning how to read. A second framework, schoolwide positive behavioral interventions and supports (SWPBIS), addressed students’ engagement in appropriate social behaviors [8].

A framework, known as a multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS), that integrated the other two frameworks, emerged over time as educators increasingly recognized the interconnection between a student’s attainment of academic skills while receiving instruction in a safe, orderly classroom [9,10]. Altogether, these frameworks have gained favor as evidenced by a report that every state’s department of education website references initiatives or guidance about the implementation of tiered systems of support [11]. Moreover, the Every Student Succeeds Act recognizes MTSS as an approach for improving outcomes for students with disabilities and English language learners [12].

Central to every multi-tiered framework has been the concept of intensifying instruction [13]. It involves adapting alterable instructional variables to further individualize a student’s instruction based on a reasoned hypothesis that it will be more effective than prior instruction [14]. The literature suggests that the concept gained a secure foothold with the establishment of the National Center on Intensive Intervention (NCII) in 2011 by the United States Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs [12]. The Center’s mission is to build stakeholders’ (i.e., Kindergarten-Grade 12 schools, parents, university faculty, etc.) capacities to address the needs of students demonstrating significant, persistent learning challenges in reading, mathematics, and behavior by implementing intensive intervention [15].

Since its inception, the NCII has championed its data-based individualization (DBI) process, which involves the systematic implementation of intensive intervention. Intensification begins when a student receives tier 2 instruction in an evidence-based standard program. This is a scripted program supported by research that focused on the fidelity of its implementation and the program’s effectiveness regarding students’ acquisition of the targeted learning outcomes. The supplemental program zeroes in on subject matter content that the student must master while increasing the student’s dosage, meaning the total time they receive instruction about the content [16,17,18].

Additionally, the intensification likely results in the student participating in a smaller group that enables them to receive more personalized attention from the teacher. Progress monitoring data are collected systematically and either confirm that a student is making sufficient progress or indicate that the instruction must be intensified further. In some instances, this process leads to a student being referred for an evaluation to determine if special education services are warranted.

The NCII’s work continues to evolve as evidenced by a recent three-part webinar series about intensification strategies [19]. Given its longevity and sponsorship by the United States federal government, the Center is regarded as an authoritative resource for credible information about intensive intervention, particularly intensifying instruction.

2. Applications of Intensifying Instruction

While the NCII has established a solid foundation for furthering educators’ understanding about intensifying instruction, circumstances have evolved such that the concept is relevant to all educators irrespective of their familiarity with, or adherence to, the NCII’s DBI process. For example, researchers have demonstrated how intensifying instruction can be used effectively in tier 1 (e.g., by having kindergarten students engage in five–seven minute, one-on-one lessons targeting foundational phonics skills during a language arts block, followed with individualized computer-assisted instruction) [20,21]. Among other things, this outcome obviates the necessity of triggering the DBI process by using a standard program at the outset of tier 2. Instead, tier 1 has been scrutinized as schools have realized the insurmountable challenges they face when trying to address every student’s academic achievement deficit with a tier 2 or 3 intervention [22].

Another relevant circumstance is that some students, such as those with a moderate or more significant intellectual disability who require tier 3 services upon entering school, do not have access to standard programs that have been developed to meet their needs [23]. Similarly, despite the NCII’s staunch advocacy for them, standard programs have not been developed for every academic skill and functional task educators must teach [24].

Hence, in some instances where standard programs are not available, educators must adapt, meaning intensify, their tier 1 instruction to create a beginning tier 2 or 3 intervention. This intervention serves as the instructional platform that may be intensified further. For students with disabilities, this platform may be their special education services, which comprise the content they will learn, the instructor and teaching methods they use, the amount of time the instruction is presented (i.e., dosage), and the location for it. Each of these aspects can be intensified as described elsewhere in this paper.

Accordingly, the remainder of this entry discusses an organizational scheme involving more than 30 instructional variables educators can adapt to intensify instruction for any student. Intensifying instruction necessarily involves various teacher and learner behaviors that occur during a lesson, as well as the amount of information presented. Altogether, these matters determine a lesson’s density in terms of the content involved.

Table 1. Organizational scheme for alterable instructional variables to intensify instruction.

Categories	Alterable Instructional Variables
Group Configuration	Pupil/teacher ratio Students’ homogeneity and heterogeneity Targeted academic skills Characteristics of thinking and learning School social skills
Time Management	Dosage Allocated, engaged, and academic learning time Transition organization within and between activities
Environmental Arrangement	Visual supports for conveying information about a location’s setup, plus routines and behavioral expectations Group management strategies Behavior modification procedures Placement of locations outside of a student’s general education classroom Extraneous cognitive load
Elements Comprising Explicit Instruction	Evidence-based practices employed Teacher modeling with a think-aloud Type and timing of checks for understanding Guided practice for skill acquisition (amount/format) Lesson review Preview of the next lesson Independent practice (amount/format) Opportunities to respond (amount/signal type) Active student response modes (oral/written/action) and formats (group, structured pairs, individual) Pace of instruction (lesson planning; material preparation; student characteristics; length of the response interval) Practice for skill maintenance (distributed, cumulative, retrieval, and interleaved) Generalization strategies (e.g., controlled variance) Type and frequency of affirmative and informative, corrective feedback
Content	Identification of critical content for a subject Prescribing an appropriate scope and sequence Determining how much content to teach
Instructors	Professional learning to address the instructor’s knowledge, skills, and disposition Using an interventionist with specialized training Assigning non-licensed but properly trained instructors (e.g., adult volunteers, older peers)
Efficiency	Training to improve an instructor’s implementation fidelity and ability to increase instructional density Changing the amount of content presented during instruction (e.g., adding incidental information) Setting the occasion for observational learning

summarizes the content comprising the scheme. It consists of seven categories of related, alterable instructional variables. The table’s content is a manifestation of the concept of instructional density.

The scheme resulted from an analysis of the alterable instructional variables discussed in numerous resources dedicated to the concept of intensifying instruction [25,26,27]. Alterable instructional variables are the actions comprising a multicomponent intervention (e.g., the types of prompts, number of opportunities to respond, frequency of feedback) and the conditions involved with presenting instruction (e.g., group size) that can be adjusted by the teacher. Conversely, there are important variables that a teacher cannot alter, such as the reasons for a student experiencing fatigue and not attending during a lesson. These variables might include not getting enough sleep or experiencing side effects from prescribed medication.

The reader is encouraged to explore the resources dedicated to the concept of intensifying instruction to further their understanding of the topic. Here, the scheme’s seven categories are defined, and ways some of the alterable variables can be configured to intensify instruction are explained.

1. Group Configuration. This category concerns the individuals comprising an instructional group and encompasses variables that address the group’s size, the students’ instructional focus, and their characteristics of thinking and learning.

A routine intensification strategy is reducing the size of the group receiving instruction so that the teacher can more readily attend to each student. The teacher can thus provide more individualized instruction through personalized scaffolded supports and behavior-specific feedback [18].

A second way to intensify instruction via a group’s configuration is to construct it to be more homogeneous regarding the academic skills to be taught. This arrangement involves structuring the group with students who are working to learn the same academic skills that are identified via diagnostic assessments. This format enables the teacher to provide all the students with more opportunities to engage with the skills through either active student responses or structured observations.

The teacher could employ choral responding that involves everyone performing the skill simultaneously, or randomly calling on one student while the others attend to that student. Research indicates that non-responders can learn new content through observational learning [28]. However, it is important to note that sometimes when students are directed to observe, they can still engage in active responding. For example, when one student is tasked to respond orally, the other students could sub-vocalize their responses. When they do, the teacher cannot provide behavior-specific feedback because they cannot verify each response. Instead, the students can self-reinforce or self-correct based on the teacher’s feedback to the student who responded aloud.

A third way to intensify instruction with a group configuration strategy that is also based on homogeneity is to include students who demonstrate similar characteristics of thinking and learning. All students in a group will receive more instruction in an orderly environment with equally attentive students as compared to a situation involving a group with one student who consistently responds impulsively, thereby disrupting the flow of the lesson and diverting the teacher’s attention to that student at everyone else’s expense in terms of opportunities to respond followed by behavior-specific feedback.

2. Time Management. This category focuses on how teachers schedule time so that more intensive instruction is provided. A four-part paradigm provides the language for explaining how this alterable instructional variable allows for intensification.

In the paradigm, allotted time refers to the total amount available for presenting instruction. One common example in the United States is a yearly school calendar comprising 180 days, each lasting seven hours. This arrangement establishes a limit for what can be taught, thereby emphasizing the importance of time management.

Allocated time is the time scheduled for each activity, such as 90 min daily for teaching language arts, 60 min for mathematics, and a 30 min lunch period. Engaged time is the time when a student attends to instruction, while academic learning time is the time when the skills taught are at a student’s instructional level [29].

A frequently referenced generic intensification strategy is increasing a student’s dosage [18]. This refers to increasing a student’s allocated time by having him participate in more instructional sessions daily or weekly, or increasing the length of his current sessions.

Educators must be diligent about attending to key instructional elements when a student’s dosage is increased. One is that the increased allocated time simultaneously involves increased engaged and academic learning time. If a student’s allocated time is increased but the student does not attend to the instruction because the content that is taught is not at the student’s instructional level, nothing will be gained. Furthermore, engaged and academic learning time may be adversely affected by an improper environmental arrangement. This matter is addressed in the following section.

A second key element is providing the student with more practice opportunities [26]. Students who demonstrate significant, persistent academic achievement deficits reportedly need 10–30 more practice opportunities to learn a skill as compared to their peers who demonstrate appropriate progress [30]. Additionally, students’ time on task has been correlated with their increased academic achievement [31].

Worth mentioning is that Fuchs and colleagues have identified adaptations involving group size and dosage as the intensification strategies to address first [18,25]. These adaptations set the stage for using intensification strategies that have been identified as having noteworthy effect sizes: practice and feedback [31].

This circumstance underscores the need to continuously assess an adaptation’s effectiveness while remaining cognizant of all the issues involved. For instance, increasing a student’s dosage, or time on task, and presenting their instruction in a small group may not, in and of themselves, be highly effective. However, employing these adaptations enables teachers to increase a student’s opportunities to respond, as well as provide appropriate support and feedback, which have proven to be highly effective.

Hattie and his colleagues’ ratings of various educational influences provide insight regarding which adaptations have proven to be relatively more or less effective [31]. Yet, when considering an adaptation’s effectiveness, one must also consider possible limitations and risks. If a student’s dosage is increased with tier 2 services, but the student misses some tier 1 instruction while receiving those services due to scheduling challenges, the student may not learn some tier 1 content. Likewise, changing the setting may lead to stigmatization by peers, presenting too much guided practice might lead to prompt dependency if the teacher’s support is not faded properly, and a student may experience unanticipated difficulty generalizing a skill if it is taught using different vocabulary in tiers 1 and 2.

Examining the potential effectiveness and limitations of an adaptation underscores that intensifying instruction involves crafting individualized interventions. These must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

3. Environmental Arrangement. This category refers to the configuration of any setting where students receive instruction and the teacher’s use of behavior supports, group management strategies, and student-specific behavior modification procedures [32]. Fuchs and colleagues distinguished between behavioral supports that address a student’s self-regulation and executive functioning and those that are based on principles that minimize non-productive behavior. The latter involves a behavior intervention plan based on a functional behavior assessment. Both would be used when the behavior supports addressing a student’s self-regulation and executive function or typical classroom management procedures prove ineffective [25].

The setting must be arranged to increase a student’s engaged time and reduce their extraneous cognitive load. A student’s cognitive load refers to the amount of information they must process, and any information other than the academic skills they are trying to learn involves a student’s extraneous cognitive load [33].

Behavior supports are intensification strategies that can increase a student’s engaged time. For example, portable dividers might be placed around the setting to eliminate distracting visual stimuli. Student-specific visual supports can reduce a student’s anxiety and enable them to concentrate on a lesson by informing them where they must sit, the lesson’s activities, the amount of teacher modeling and student practice that will occur, and when a student will be called on [32].

Additionally, a teacher can employ group management strategies consisting of routines that reduce the time students spend in unproductive transitions between and within activities. Likewise, the teacher can convey clear behavioral expectations by using concise, precise language. When these strategies are not effective at increasing a student’s engaged time, a behavior intervention plan involving behavior modification procedures tailored to the student’s needs can be implemented [34].

Sometimes, a student’s instruction will be intensified by presenting it in a location outside of their general education classroom. This might be the case for a student who remarks that they are challenged to remain engaged because they are thinking about their peers’ perceptions as they receive intensive instruction in a general education classroom.

4. Elements Comprising Explicit Instruction. Explicit instruction is an evidence-based approach for presenting a lesson that has significant research support for its effectiveness across students and subjects [35]. It is intentional and teacher-directed, involving multiple research-supported instructional behaviors. Elsewhere, these behaviors have been referred to as elements.

The elements are alterable instructional variables that can be adapted to intensify instruction. Archer and Hughes identified 16 elements and organized them into four categories, or components [29]. Three are discussed here: design of instruction, delivery of instruction, and practice.

The design of instruction comprises an organized three-part lesson having an opening, body, and closing. Elements for the opening include the instructor stating the targeted learning objective that the students will learn. This will be an academic skill or a functional task (e.g., handwashing). The instructor may also present a reason for learning the objective and conduct retrieval practice to assess the student’s progress if the objective has been taught across multiple lessons.

The body begins with the teacher demonstrating how to perform the targeted learning objective while engaging in a think-aloud. Attention is paid to the teacher’s language, ensuring it is clear, concise, precise, and consistent. Following the demonstration, the teacher provides scaffolded support for the students to perform the objective correctly. This element is often referred to as guided practice.

Guided practice can occur during tabletop instruction when a discrete skill is the focus. For instance, the teacher might present a prompt in the form of the first two sounds in the word cat to set the occasion for the student to read the word correctly. Similarly, it can occur during a chained task where an academic skill is embedded in a natural routine, and prompting is employed accordingly. An example is when a teacher uses most-to-least prompting to teach a student how to rote count to 10 within a handwashing routine. The student performs the academic skill while rubbing his hands with soap to ensure they are cleaned thoroughly.

The teacher also periodically conducts checks for understanding to gather data about any misunderstandings and the students’ progress toward skill mastery. The instructor also uses this formative assessment data to decide whether to have the students engage in independent practice later in the lesson.

In the closing, the teacher reviews the lesson and previews the following related lesson. The teacher then assigns appropriate independent work.

Throughout each part, the teacher employs elements comprising a second explicit instruction component: the delivery of instruction. One element involves the instructor’s use of opportunities to respond, followed by students’ active responding.

An opportunity to respond encompasses a teacher’s action that solicits a student’s performance of an academic skill or functional task. Examples include asking a question and presenting a directive. An active student response is an observable, measurable behavior. The three types include an oral response, a written response, and an action, such as holding a thumbs up to indicate “Yes” as a response or a thumbs down to communicate “No.”

A second element is the teacher’s presentation of immediate, behavior-specific feedback. The teacher affirms accurate responses and corrects incorrect responses, being certain to state the behavior the student engaged in that resulted in the feedback provided. A third element is the teacher’s management of the pace of instruction. The teacher must be timely in executing the elements so that the students remain engaged and can cognitively process all the information presented.

A third component, comprising explicit instruction, is practice. Over time, the instructor leads the students in practice activities that build the students’ fluency at performing a skill and lead to its storage in long-term memory.

Elements comprising this component include distributed practice, which involves systematically scheduling practice across time rather than conducting it in only one concentrated session just prior to an assessment; retrieval practice, where students must recall the skill from memory, preferably at a point in time when they are about to forget the skill; and, interleaved practice that includes switching among topics and performing different skills that require the student to demonstrate cognitive flexibility [36,37].

This matter highlights how the elements involved with intensifying instruction must be “fit for purpose.” For example, opportunities to respond must address the student’s phase of learning (e.g., acquisition, fluency, maintenance, and generalization/adaptation). The previous discussion about practice revealed how intensifying instruction through structuring opportunities to respond can address the maintenance phase. Another example would be providing a student with practice opportunities that must be completed accurately but within a designated timeframe (e.g., 1 min) to address fluency.

Any of the elements described above can be adapted to intensify instruction. These adaptations include how the element is addressed, how many times it is addressed during a lesson, and when it is presented relative to the other elements. Hence, the are innumerable ways to intensify instruction with an explicit instruction approach.

5. Content. Content refers to the curriculum (i.e., a listing of the academic skills and functional tasks) that students are taught. It is an important fourth component of an explicit instruction approach, but it is covered in a separate category in this paper so the reader can easily distinguish between how to teach versus what to teach.

As was noted previously, instruction can be intensified by increasing a student’s academic learning time. This starts with a diagnostic assessment that identifies instructional level content and then involves time management strategies for maximizing a student’s academic learning time.

Instruction can also be intensified by adapting various aspects of the core curriculum. One aspect is settling on critical content. For instance, research has established topics that must be addressed to teach students how to read: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension [38]. Another aspect is teaching the content in a proper sequence through consideration of relevant issues that include identifying and prioritizing (a) prerequisite skills, (b) high-frequency versus low-frequency skills, (c) less complex skills, and (d) skills that are more dissimilar than similar [39].

A third aspect involves task analyzing the content to identify how to group it so that an appropriate amount is taught at one time. This consideration accounts for a student’s intrinsic cognitive load, or working memory. Working memory is the aspect of cognition that deals with new information. A student’s working memory is limited and varies across students. Additionally, the new information remains in working memory for a short period of time unless a student performs an action with it. These actions both keep the information in working memory and build the pathways that transfer it to long-term memory, at which point learning is said to have occurred [40].

There are three key takeaways for teachers regarding intensifying instruction with these elements. Two are that teachers must teach critical content and account for the limitations involved with every student’s working memory. The other is that teachers must direct students to frequently perform actions with the information.

6. Instructors. An instructor’s knowledge, skills, and disposition can be adapted to intensify instruction. Properly constructed professional learning can improve an instructor’s knowledge about the subject matter they teach and the evidence-based practices for teaching it. Likewise, these experiences can assist an instructor in altering their disposition in a way that leads to their improvement in building rapport with students. Establishing a positive rapport with students has been shown to be an element comprising effective tutoring, which is an example of intensifying instruction [41].

An alternative adaptation would be to arrange for a student to work with an interventionist who specializes in presenting supplemental instruction specific to a subject (e.g., a reading or mathematics interventionist). A much different, yet viable, instructor-centered intensification strategy involves providing a student with an instructor when none were available previously, resulting in a “better than nothing approach.” This would be the case when a paraprofessional, adult volunteer, or peer tutor is assigned to present intensive instruction. Over time, through formal training and experience, these instructors likely would demonstrate the ability to present effective instruction, though not on par with a licensed educator or interventionist [41].

7. Efficiency. Efficiency is an instructional feature comprising the resources involved with effective instruction and the outcomes realized [42]. Regarding the resources involved, instruction can be intensified as increased efficiency is achieved when a teacher presents the same amount of effective instruction in less time. This results in additional time being freed up for more instruction. In terms of the outcomes attained, increased instructional efficiency occurs when a student learns more content in the same amount of time. This can occur during group instruction through observational learning of another student’s differing content, or by learning incidental information a teacher presents intentionally during a lesson [28,43]. For example, a teacher may remark on how to spell a number word when teaching a student an addition basic fact that involves the number as an addend.

Instructional efficiency is a subcomponent of the concept of instructional density. This concept refers to the amount of teacher and learner behaviors that occur within a lesson’s timeframe, and the amount of information presented [44]. Teachers should strive to present the densest instruction possible. Factors such as the extent of a student’s working memory and the teacher’s abilities at presenting instruction will impact the density that can be produced.

3. Conclusions and Prospects

Intensifying instruction has become a formal process within organizational schemes like an MTSS. A key feature of intensification is that the variables contributing to it are under a teacher’s control. Teachers’ abilities to truly individualize instruction for every student are greatly enhanced through learning about manipulating the variables identified herein and the continued development of assistive technologies such as artificial intelligence that will help with this task. At the very least, artificial intelligence can help with scheduling, which often presents a major challenge when school personnel attempt to increase a student’s dosage by providing supplemental tier 2 or 3 instruction while not reducing the student’s participation in tier 1. Uses of digital tools for presenting intensive instruction continue to undergo development as computer-assisted diagnostic assessments and lessons that students can complete independently and that supplement teacher-directed instruction have proven effective [20]. Hence, it is anticipated that multifaceted intensive instruction will result in noteworthy achievement gains for every student.