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Educational psychology plays a critical role in assessing, supporting and enhancing student learning, development and well-being (Martin et al., 2020). Educational psychologists conduct psychoeducational assessments, consult with schools, provide interventions and engage in research to deepen the field’s understanding of learning processes and outcomes. Adopting Precision Teaching (PT) could amplify educational psychologists’ capacity to serve students struggling academically or behaviourally. PT is a measurement/decision-making system centred on precisely defining target behaviours, systematically measuring performance through frequency recording, displaying data on standard celeration charts, analysing data patterns and making data-based decisions about needed programme changes (Kubina, 2019). The manifold benefits of PT for educational psychologists bear consideration.
Assessment
A core function of educational psychology involves conducting comprehensive assessments to identify a student’s cognitive, academic, socioemotional and behavioural strengths and needs. PT could improve assessment in several respects. Firstly, PT uses specific “pinpoints” to define target behaviours that are observable, measurable and action-oriented (Evans et al., 2021). Replacing vague phrases like “reading comprehension problems” with precise pinpoints such as “says retell fact from a second-grade passage at 10–12 facts per minute with 0–1 errors” would significantly enhance assessment clarity.
Secondly, PT assessments emphasise direct behaviour frequency measures over indirect scores from norm-referenced tests. Stating a student reads 93 words correctly and 5 words incorrectly with a 3rd-grade narrative text adds precision and insight into a specific reading performance. Assessing reading frequencies across time paints a picture of learning, allowing the educational psychologist to determine growth in learning (i.e. celeration). For example, a celeration value of ×1.5 means the student has grown their skill by 50% per week. Growth rates or celeration values will promote judgement and analysis of reading progress differently when compared with a single standard score representing general “reading achievement”.
And thirdly, PT further enriches assessment through daily measurement and other standard celeration chart metrics (see Table 1). Many metrics exist in a standardised form to enrich the understanding of students with intellectual and other developmental disabilities performance measured and charted across time. Such measures span an individual’s performance (i.e. frequency) to show showing learning (i.e. celeration) and how robustly an intervention or programme (i.e. bounce) influences the acquisition of material.
Intervention
When assessment reveals academic or behavioural issues, educational psychologists may provide...