Pennsylvania’s SS/HS initiative has developed a protocol to guide community-level teams in identifying and selecting well-founded programs and practices to address salient student and school needs that fit the local circumstances and context. The protocol is designed to be used by an inclusive team involving educators, student and family representatives, as well as system partners. The team collaboratively assesses key readiness factors, prioritizes areas of focus based on extensive examination of student needs, maps existing, relevant efforts in the community, examines credible registries to discover evidence-based options that can be expected to address existing gaps in programming, and then applies a modified Hexagon Tool from implementation science to compare up to three pertinent EBPs to determine the best choice to be included in the multi-tiered system of support for local students.
Pennsylvania’s three demonstration schools/districts have each used the EBP selection protocol to address priority student needs across all essential elements of the SS/HS Framework. In fact, 80% of schools among the three sites used the process to select EBPs, and more than 70% of those schools had initiated implementation efforts in support of those selections by the end of the 2015-16 school year.
“This hybrid protocol offers promise as an empirically-supported mechanism to select EBPs
within the context of school-wide positive behavior intervention and supports.”
— Runge, T., Knoster, T., Moerer, D., Breinich, T. & Palmiero, J. (2017)
Pennsylvania’s EBP selection protocol guide is available here. Its primary developers and implementers have published an extensive case study about the application of Pennsylvania’s EBP selection protocol within one implementation site, Intermediate Unit #21 (Lehigh Learning and Achievement School, and local feeder school districts).
