You'll learn to love it? Examining the relationship between intervention dose and acceptability among third-grade students

The acceptability of school-based interventions has been regularly examined among teachers and parents; however, students are less frequently assessed despite being the recipients of most interventions. Although recent studies have begun exploring how different student characteristics (e.g., gender) and types of acceptability assessments (e.g., dynamic) impact students' ratings, no studies have examined the role of intervention dosage despite early conceptual models highlighting the linkage between intervention acceptability, dosage, adherence, and effectiveness. This study explored 255 third-grade students' intervention dosage and acceptability ratings within the context of a class-wide writing intervention administered over 7 weeks. Results indicated that most students received a high number of intervention sessions throughout the study and rated the intervention as moderately acceptable. There was a statistically significant gender difference in students' postintervention acceptability ratings, with female students rating the class-wide writing intervention higher than male students. In addition, intervention dosage was a statistically significant predictor of students' postintervention acceptability ratings, although gender did not moderate these findings. Most students received the full intervention dosage or missed one intervention session, with female and male students having similar cumulative intervention doses.Students who received a greater amount of intervention dosage provided higher intervention acceptability ratings than students who received lower amounts of intervention dosages.Although female students rated the intervention higher than male students, these differing ratings were not associated with intervention dosage.