Single Subject Design for School Psychology and Special Education

These reference sources provide information about the foundations of single-subject design, including core concepts and definitions, and they provide examples from case studies. If you are accessing these resources from off-campus, you will be prompted to enter your WSU ID and password when you click the hyperlinked text. 

• "In this chapter, we begin by taking you through the foundations, or basic features, of single-subject designs. Next we describe ways to measure changes in the student or case that is the target of the intervention. We then describe different designs and connect them to their uses for teaching, student evaluation, and research and briefly outline methods for interpreting the findings. We end the chapter with a discussion of ethical issues in single-subject design."

• "The single-case approach is often referred to as the single-participant or single-subject design....We remain consistent with our terminology and refer to these as single-case approaches and reserve the word design for the specific type of design defined within the approach. A single-case approach is used to demonstrate a form of experimental control with one participant (in some instances more than one participant)."
• "There are many forms, variations, and names of research designs for single-case approaches. We discuss four of the major designs here, with the understanding that this is not a comprehensive coverage of all the designs developed within this approach. The primary goal of the single-case approach is to measure the dependent variable and at the very minimum measure it against the presence and absence of the independent variable (treatment or intervention). Therefore, the design logic of a single-case approach starts with the baseline, which is designated as A, and then the treatment is designated as B."

• Abstract: "With growing popularity of single subject design as a method to evaluate the efficacy of interventions, it is important to ensure that the analyses of these methods are rigorous and reliable. The purpose of this case study is to discuss the measures used to evaluate the efficacy of interventions in single subject design studies in the fields of special education and school psychology. Specifically, we report research which has demonstrated that the sole use of visual analysis to examine single subject design studies may be insufficient with regards to reliability. Then, we present the number of single subject design studies completed between 2002 and 2012 that have reported the use of effect size measures across the following five prominent educational research journals: Journal of Special Education, Journal of School Psychology, Exceptional Children, School Psychology Quarterly, and School Psychology Review.  Information is provided on the total number of single subject design studies found per journal and the percentage of those reporting effect size measures."