An Introduction to Adaptive Interventions and SMART Designs in Education

Education practice often requires teachers and other school personnel to adapt interventions over time in order to address between-student heterogeneity in response to intervention (e.g., what works for one student may not work for the other) or within-student heterogeneity (e.g., what works now may not work in the future for the same student). An adaptive intervention allows education practitioners to do this in a prespecified, systematic, and replicable way through a sequence of decision rules that guides whether, how, and when to modify interventions. In an adaptive intervention, the practitioner modifies the dosage or type of intervention, or the mode of delivery to meet the unique and changing needs of students as they progress over time. The sequential, multiple assignment, randomized trial (SMART) is one type of multistage, experimental design that can help education researchers build high-quality adaptive interventions. Despite the critical role adaptive interventions can play in various domains of education, research about adaptive interventions and about the use of SMART designs to develop effective adaptive interventions in education is in its infancy. This paper defines an adaptive intervention and reviews the components of this design, discusses the key features of the SMART, and introduces common research questions for which SMARTs may be appropriate.