Making the Most of Community-Based Instruction: Progress Monitoring for Strategic Decision Making

Community-based learning experiences in high school have been associated with a range of positive outcomes, including school attendance, academic achievement, career development, and postschool employment, among high school students with and without disabilities (Alsbury et al., 2020; Test et al., 2009). Community-based instruction (CBI) is one type of community experience in which students with disabilities work toward instructional goals while engaged in activities occurring in a natural environment outside of a typical school setting (Hoover, 2016; Rowe et al., 2015). Educators who implement CBI capitalize on their students’ time in the community to ensure that students are doing more than simply experiencing a new setting; during CBI, students learn and generalize skills and knowledge that will support their engagement in that setting and future success. For example, CBI has been used to teach students how to use an ATM (Barczak, 2019), use a cell phone for safety (Bassette et al., 2018), and shop at a grocery store (Gil et al., 2019). Among students with intellectual and developmental disabilities across grade levels, evidence suggests that interventions taking place in community settings have positive effects on student learning, generalization, and maintenance of skills (Gilson et al., 2017; Walker et al., 2010).