Frequently Asked Questions

General

IM4 is an application for all students (K-12) who are involved in intervention programming related to social, emotional, and behavioral challenges that serve as barriers to learning.  The IM4 system has many ready-to-go interventions based on whether the student’s main problems of concern are due to a performance-deficit (won’t do or lack of will) and acquisition-deficit (can’t do or lack of skill). Each intervention is coupled with an automated implementation-facilitation function, such as a step-by-step outline of the active ingredients, customizability progress monitoring tool that can be tailored case-by-case, and fidelity checklist to track the degree to which the intervention is delivered as planned. Also, there is a function to add Ad Hoc interventions and simply use the IM4 as an automated implementation aid to do planning, PM, graphing, fidelity check and decision making.

We can import student data from the most common student data management systems that are in use by schools, such as Powerschool, Schoology, Infinite Campus, Skyward, eSchoolPlus.

We have a tour with screenshots available on our website. You may view the tour here: https://im4education.com/tour/. You can also request a free consultation and demo to help determine if the web-based app will meet your site’s needs. This will allow you to essentially see and get a sense of all the features of IM4 that could help guide, manage and enhance intervention programming in your school. Send us an email at im4@umn.edu to set up a demo today!

No, there is currently not a trial version, however you can request a free consultation and demo to help determine if the web-based app will meet your site’s needs. This will allow you to essentially see and get a sense of all the features of IM4 that could help guide, manage and enhance intervention programming in your school. Send us an email at im4@umn.edu to set up a demo today!

IM4 is a solution that is designed to fit within a multi-tiered system of support. It serves as a problem-solving-oriented platform for guiding effective intervention programming for students who exhibit a need for intervention above and beyond that of Tier 1 alone. Schools that are already undertaking the implementation of MTSS find IM4 to be helpful with refining current systems of support they already have in place to enhance the likelihood that intervention efforts for students with social, emotional and behavioral needs will produce positive outcomes. In particular, IM4 helps schools incrementally refine and improve (a) the process of matching students to more precise and likely effective interventions, (b) implementation plans to ensure the intervention is delivered with fidelity, (c) the monitoring of both progress monitoring and intervention fidelity data, and (d) problem-solving oriented meetings to facilitate data-driven decision making that inform the next action steps educators will take to support the student.

Pricing and Training

The cost is based on license per school with unlimited users and students.

1 site $599
2-5 sites $579
6-10 Sites $559
11-20 sites $539
21-50 sites $519
51+ sites $499

One full academic year, with option to renew.

We have some documents you can share with your administrator that help outline the need for IM4. One document highlights the current problems/difficulties with selecting, delivering, and monitoring interventions for students with social, emotional and behavioral needs. These problems are paired with the features of IM4 that serve as solutions to the everyday problems/difficulties schools face on their own when trying to support students with social, emotional and behavioral needs.

There are training materials and videos including with the tool to guide your team to implement IM4 in your school(s). We also offer custom in-person training opportunities to meet your site’s needs and guide you in implementation. Contact us at im4@umn.edu for more information on our training options.

Intended Audience

IM4 is designed for students in K-12.

Students who are ideal candidates for IM4 are those who are exhibiting social, emotional and behavioral challenges that interfere with their or others academic success and, therefore, in need of support above and beyond universal Tier 1 programming alone. Typically these students are determined to be in need of a formalized intervention process, like IM4, through proactive detection efforts, such as universal screening, existing data (office referrals, attendance, suspensions, lack of work completion), and/or teacher nomination or referral. If your school system does not currently have a procedure in place to proactively detect students who are in need of intervention, we can provide a validated behavior screening instrument at no cost, as well as help you use existing sources of school administrative data to detect students who need intervention or refine your current teacher referral method to be more structured and objective (that is, structured teacher nomination process).

Ideally, there is a point-person in the building who is assigned responsibility for developing internal expertise on how best to optimize the use of IM4 to support intervention programming for students with social, emotional, and behavioral needs. This person could be an administrator, school counselor, behavior specialist, school psychologist, or another staff person with some background experience supporting students with social, emotional, and behavioral need.

With regard to actual implementation of the interventions, depending on the matched intervention, there are different levels of staff members who may be needed to deliver the active ingredients (core components) of the intervention. Any person within the school, such as paraprofessionals, behavior specialists, teachers, etc., can be trained to effectively implement the interventions. Training materials are provided within the IM4 application under the “Resource” tab. Additional training can be done for an extra fee.

SAEBRS is a great tool to detect students who have social, emotional, and behavioral needs and may benefit from Tier 2 intervention programming. IM4 includes a more change sensitive progress monitoring tool within it (i.e., direct behavior rating) that gets customized to the student. IM4 also provides a BEISY which may serve as an alternative to SAEBRS for its better efficiency (BEISY only has six items and can easily be used for class or school-wide screening. The items in BEISY are also matched to the first step of problem identification in IM4). 

Second Step is more of a universal SEL curriculum than a Tier 2 intervention. It has broad coverage of a range of social and emotional competencies. That being said, it can be used as an acquisition-based intervention for students who are IM4 has identified as having an acquisition need and specifically lagging skills in emotion regulation.  IM4 also connects students with acquisition needs to more focused small group Tier 2 curricula, such as Coping Cat (anxiety), Anger Replacement Training (anger), CBITS (trauma). 

The most common practice for school-wide implementation is to have your student support team or problem solving team schedule a FREE IM4 demo/meeting where we would take your team inside the system and answer any questions your team may have. Having a team who are the primary IM4 facilitators and being the "go to" for your school is recommended. There are many training and tutorials videos included with the IM4 system that are intended to bring everyone up to speed. One of those is the 4-hour training video of Dr. Cook presenting on MTSS/Tier I&II. 

For students who have been individually identified as having an acquisition deficit and in need of a trauma intervention, the group would be constructed and IM4 progress monitoring would be conducted individually, in different settings.  Progress in response to the intervention gets tracked by having people outside of the Bounce Back sessions complete the direct behavior ratings on the student's functioning in the setting in which they were struggling. The students in the group could be in different classes which means that different teachers would complete the direct behavior ratings within IM4. In this way, there is no way to complete the rating on the group as whole and it would not be advised. Essentially, each student would have their own direct behavior rating form based on the behavior problems of concern and those would be completed by the teacher or other adult who is in charge of the environment in which the problem behavior is occurring.

Reporting and Fidelity Features

There are several reporting features available in the IM4 platform. First, IM4 allows for reporting at the individual student-level, which involves (1) information related to the specific matched intervention, (2) a map outlining the implementation plan, (3) graphed progress monitoring data that depicts the students response to the intervention along with fidelity data capturing the degree to which the intervention was delivered as planned, and (4) results of any meeting that involved making a data-driven decision. This information is only a button click away once a student is activated in the system and is critical to track efforts within the school to support specific students who need information.

Second, IM4 allows for reporting at the class-level to track which students in a given class are currently active in the system and at some place in the intervention programming process (that is, match, map, monitor, or meet). It also provides summary data to get a sense of what intervention students are receiving, estimates of the fidelity with which the intervention is being delivered, and other relevant demographic information.

Third, IM4 allows for reporting at the school-level. All the data at the individual student level can be aggregated to the school-level to create summary statistics for review by administrators. For example, an administrator can produce a summary of the number of students who are actively receiving intervention in the school, the types of interventions being delivered, the average fidelity of the interventions that are currently being implemented, and general indicators of the success of the intervention effort (for example, the percent of students who are responding positively to the interventions).

Evidence based interventions included in IM4

The IM4 system has many ready-to-go interventions based on performance-deficit and acquisition deficit. Each intervention is coupled with an automated implementation-facilitation function, such as a step-by-step manual, customizable PM tool that can be tailored case-by-case, and fidelity checklist. There is a function to add Ad Hoc interventions and simply use the IM4 as an automated implementation aid to do planning, PM, graphing, fidelity check and decision making.

The performance-based interventions include:

  • Class pass intervention
    • (for students who are capable of doing academic work but seek to avoid/escape doing it)
  • Self-monitoring protocol
    • (for students who are capable of staying on-task but need reminders, encouragements and nudges to do so)
  • School-home note system
    • (for students who are capable of exhibiting the desired behavior but can benefit from greater continuity and consistency of consequences for behavior across school and home)
  • Positive peer reporting
    • (for students who are socially capable but are in need of additional social opportunities to be recognized by peers for the positive things they do in school)
  • Behavior contract
    • (for students who are capable of exhibiting the desired behavior but currently those behaviors do not result in enough payoff relative to problem behaviors. These students are eager to earn access to desired experiences based on behavior and receive recognition/acknowledgment for doing so)
  • Check in/check out mentoring/coaching
    • (for students who are capable of exhibiting desired behavior and respond positively to adult attention. Structured adult attention is used to get the day off to a good start and debrief on the backend of the day to encourage and motivate the student to continue to do well)

The acquisition-based interventions include:

Emotion regulation (student is in need of learning knowledge and skills to better manage emotions that are currently impacting behavior and academic performance)

  • Anxiety/depression
  • Anger/aggression
  • Trauma

Behavioral regulation (student is in need of better regulating behavior during social and/or academic situations)

  • Social skills deficit
  • Executive functioning skills deficit (organization, planning, impulse control/attention regulation)

The acquisition-based interventions involve the use of an evidence-based curriculum that has been shown to improve skill acquisition in the identified area of need. For example, the Coping Cat intervention is an evidence-based small group intervention designed for students with acquisition deficits in the area of emotion regulation as it relates to managing anxiety. IM4 includes an overview of the different evidence-based interventions that fall under the different categories of acquisition deficits (Emotion Regulation: anger, anxiety, trauma; Behavior Regulation: social skills, executive functioning).

Download research information here.

We can suggest using external programs that cost $25-$150 for the acquisition-based deficit interventions that are not included in IM4. We have a document with a list of the curriculum that might be needed. This list is kept constrained to only include those we found to be backed by science and data.

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