Baselines and Basics: some issues in the assessment of behavioural interventions in education

Abstract Teachers are increasingly making use of behavioural techniques in their everyday classroom practice. The need for empirical demonstration of effectiveness is integral to the behavioural approach and calls for the use of some sort of experimental design, both to show a relationship between the teacher's actions and change in the child's behaviour, and to discount alternative explanations of such change. The baseline, a measure of the behaviour to be changed, is seen as performing a key function in any such design. The advantages and disadvantages for applied research of group and single case experimental designs are examined. It is argued that the latter provide a particularly appropriate means for practising teachers to evaluate their own work. Five well‐established forms of single case design are discussed in detail and an actual example of each in use is given.