The Effectiveness of SAFMEDS Flashcards Instruction Combined with Precision Teaching Measurement Approaches for Improving Content Acquisition in an Undergraduate Special Education Course

SAFMEDS, an acronym for Say All Fast a Minute Each Day Shuffle, was coined by Lindsley (1983) as a functional flashcard procedure for building large repertoires of sight words in a given content area. This demonstration project evaluated the effectiveness of SAFMEDS on the classwide acquisition and fluency of basic concepts in curriculum-based assessment/Precision Teaching course. The perspective of this project was to implement SAFMEDS procedures as a means of teaching college level students to recognize important concepts related to instruction covered in a curriculum-based assessment/Precision Teaching course. Second, the instructor wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to model the importance of frequent and daily measurement of curriculum through the use of the SAFMEDS procedure with the class. One university class with 48 students participated in this research. Three individual students from this class display their data and describe the importance of utilizing their data for making instructional changes. The students in the class completed three decks of SAMFEDS across a 10-week period with an instructional aim of 40+ SAFMEDS flashcard correctly identified during a series of one-minute timing. Results from this study replicated the SAFMEDS data paths across three classes and seven decks of SAFMEDS. The monitoring of this procedure was used by the instructor to determine whether the SAFMEDS procedures was effective on a classwide basis for improving the acquisition of key concepts imbedded with in the curriculum. Additionally, this daily in class probing of students\u27 performance was a means of modeling appropriate implementation, recording, charting, and evaluation of students\u27 learning pictures. The consistent pattern of celerating data seemed to indicate that this was an effective instructional strategy for the class as a whole. Implications and limitations of the current study were also discussed