Treatment Integrity and Social Validity in Tiered Systems

Abstract

Treatment integrity and social validity are two concepts fundamental to rigorous educational research. With the increasing adoption of tiered systems as an organizational structure to guide coordinated efforts to support students with diverse learning needs, treatment integrity and social validity take on additional practical importance. Tiered systems involve the use of data and implementation of evidence-based practices across multiple tiers of prevention and intervention. To successfully implement such systems, educators make decisions regarding students’ responsiveness to each tier of instruction. The selection of practices and evaluation of whether they are effective requires knowledge of whether they are implemented as planned (i.e., treatment integrity) and how stakeholders view the social importance of goals, social acceptability of procedures, and social significance of the outcomes (i.e., social validity). In this chapter, we identify how the measurement and use of treatment integrity and social validity data are foundational to implementation of tiered systems, describe how extant research has addressed these concepts, and provide recommendations to the field for advancing the collection and use of these data within tiered systems.