This is a image of a teacher and student/user. The teacher is blue and the student is green.

Monitoring Progress with I-Connect

Mentor Meeting

Purpose of mentor meeting: The mentor meeting is intended to establish rapport between the student and the mentor, or teacher implementing the intervention, and provide a scheduled time for progress monitoring .

Meeting Length: This meeting is meant to be a quick 5-10min check-in to review charts of the students progress, and provides an opportunity for recognition of success, feedback and adjustments to the prompt, interval and goal.

Suggested frequency: Mentor meetings can take place as frequently or infrequently as needed, but is recommended weekly or at least monthly.

Promoting student self-determination: During the mentor meeting the student should reflect on their progress and provide feedback about components of I-Connect that are useful, necessary adjustments or preferences. Encouraging the student to play an active role in their education and decision-making helps to strengthen self determination and improve student agency and voice.

Data-driven decision making – Student monitoring data: is transferred into charts that are visible to both students, mentors and invited stakeholders (i.e., parents, outside service providers, etc.) for progress-monitoring. The charts demonstrate the student’s progress towards meeting their I-Connect goal. This information can be used to make data-driven decisions to continue or discontinue the use of the intervention or make adjustments to the prompt, interval or goal.

Student-driven: Self-monitoring with I-Connect means giving students the tools to be aware and in charge of their own behavior, reducing the need for adults to provide prompting or correction to address student behavior. To empower students, decisions about what and when to monitor should be heavily influenced by the students’ feedback. For example, understanding the students’ thoughts regarding the app’s usability, if using the app is accurately target the intended behavior(s), and if the app is helpful to the student.

This is an image of an I-Connect student-teacher conversation, they are discussing the students progress data

Fading

When a student is regularly meeting their goal and the target behavior is occurring as often as appropriate, the student and mentor should discuss how to fade out the use of self-monitoring. To fade self-monitoring the prompt frequency (i.e., interval) can be systematically increased or the length of the monitoring session can be adjusted. Fading can help students to maintain positive behaviors over longer periods of time.

Generalization

The behaviors learned while self monitoring can be generalized to new settings (i.e. other classrooms) or contexts (i.e. during group work). Also, the use of I-Connect can be used to teach new skills. For example, a student who has been monitoring during independent reading time, may then work to generalize the positive behavior levels displayed during independent math work time, as well.