The Conduct and Reporting of Intervention

This commentary begins with a description of the various types of comparison or control groups that have been used in intervention studies and notes the need for researchers to meet and make recommendations about which types of comparison groups are most appropriate. I then discuss the importance of instruction and (a) present a list of instructional procedures that might be considered when evaluating or planning instruction during an intervention, (b) describe the need for researchers to provide implementation checklists for others to use, and (c) discuss the need for journals to provide fuller descriptions of the instruction in an intervention. There is also a discussion of two general problems that have emerged from reviewing this research: (a) the results obtained when standardized tests have been used in these studies are different from the results obtained when experimenter-developed comprehension tests have been used, and (b) there are no accepted procedures for deciding how many effect sizes to compute when conducting a meta-analysis when there are multiple treatment groups, multiple control groups, and multiple outcome measures.