Active Student Responding
Active Student Responding (ASR) is a strategy used for students with emotional behavioral disorder, ADHD/ADD, and ASD. According to the Council for Exceptional Children, students with emotional behavioral disorder tend to have less positive experiences in school. For this reason, they often lack desire or will to succeed. In order to manage off-task and disruptive behavior, teachers can use this strategy to keep students engaged and on-task. Active student responding allows students opportunity to respond frequently and provides an opportunity for the teacher to deliver immediate feedback to the student (Toms, 2015).
ASR strategies provide an opportunity for students to be actively engaged in learning and provided active responses to a particular prompt or stimuli. Teachers use ASR strategies with all students, but these strategies are particularly helpful for students with exceptionalities because they may require more support or engagement to stay on task. Active student response strategies can be written, action, or oral responses. For example, guided notes, timed trials, choral responding, response cards, think-pair-write-share, corners, response round table, and cloze reading are all ASR strategies.
Active Student Responding involves the student making observable and measurable responses to instruction as it is happening (Byrd & Killu, 173). As ASR measures the frequency of student responses, it also functions as an indirect measure of the amount of instruction during a lesson. For instance, during a lesson the teacher can observe how much students are actively engaged, rather than passively listening or observing.
ASR strategies provide an opportunity for students to be actively engaged in learning and provided active responses to a particular prompt or stimuli. Teachers use ASR strategies with all students, but these strategies are particularly helpful for students with exceptionalities because they may require more support or engagement to stay on task. Active student response strategies can be written, action, or oral responses. For example, guided notes, timed trials, choral responding, response cards, think-pair-write-share, corners, response round table, and cloze reading are all ASR strategies.
Active Student Responding involves the student making observable and measurable responses to instruction as it is happening (Byrd & Killu, 173). As ASR measures the frequency of student responses, it also functions as an indirect measure of the amount of instruction during a lesson. For instance, during a lesson the teacher can observe how much students are actively engaged, rather than passively listening or observing.
Byrd and Killu (2015) refer to three specific benefits of using ASR in the classroom: 1.) ASR generates more learning, because it increases the number of active responses. 2.) ASR provides immediate feedback for students and teacher alike. When teachers receive immediate feedback on student performance, they can assess the effectiveness of the lesson towards meeting the objective. 3.) ASR is correlated with increased on-task behavior because students are actively engaged.
Response cards are one type of ASR strategies that are quite useful for all content areas. For using this is math instruction, the teacher would provide a math problem for the students. They would then be asked to “write”. They would write their answers on an individual white board. The teacher would then say, “show”, and the students would hold up their whiteboards. At this point, the teacher would receive immediate feedback in the form of a formative assessment, and then the teacher would show her/his whiteboard and provide the appropriate answer.