Implementing Response-to-Intervention in Elementary and Secondary Schools

Procedures to Assure Scientific-Based Practices, Second Edition

Matthew K. Burns, Kimberly Gibbons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136480188
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

An update to the bestselling first edition, this practical guidebook for implementing a school-wide Response-to-Intervention (RTI) model clearly and concisely presents issues from assessment and decision-making to Tiers I, II, and III interventions. The authors discuss what RTI is and why it is used, how to conduct assessments within an RtI system, and how to create a school-wide organization to facilitate RTI. Curricula, instruction, and intervention strategies for each Tier level covered in detail, and answers to frequently asked questions and tips for getting started are also provided. Each chapter has been extensively revised and updated with the most current research and work in the field. New to this edition are a chapter on RTI in early childhood settings and a section in each chapter focused on considerations for secondary schools. The downloadable resources include forms, checklists, reports, and progress monitoring materials to assist practitioners in the implementation of interventions. With this valuable, practical resource, school-based practitioners will be able to put the information they read into action immediately to enhance the implementation of RtI services for their schools and students.

One
Response-to-Intervention: What It Is and Why We Do It

The title of this chapter may sound familiar to many because it is an intentional paraphrase of the first chapter in Shinn’s (1989) curriculum-based measurement (CBM) book written by Doug Marston. The reason for this paraphrasing is because much of the basis for response-to-intervention, CBM, and many current initiatives in education can be traced to the work on data-based decision making by Deno and Mirkin (1977) and the A Nation at Risk report (U.S. Department of Education, 1983). It seems that data-based decision making is a concept whose time has come in education, but it has been a long time coming. Thus, we kept the title of the first chapter the same for the second edition of the book, even though the field has progressed much since the first edition was published.

Response-to-intervention (RtI) is the systematic use of assessment data to allocate resources most efficiently in order to improve learning for all students (Burns and VanDerHeyden, 2006). Thus, it is the latest installment of the data-based decision-making movement that began with Bloom, Hastings, and Madaus’s (1971) seminal work on formative assessment, which was then further operationalized by Deno and Mirkin (1977). However, the recent federal provision for RtI was the culmination of years of events that affected how RtI is conceptualized today. Therefore, the goal of this first chapter is to discuss how we got here, what RtI is, establish problem solving as the basis for RtI, what has changed since the first edition was published, and what happens when RtI is implemented.

How We Got Here

The 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act stated that a local education agency “may use a process that determines if the child responds to scientific, research-based intervention as a part of the evaluation procedures” (Pub. L. No. 108-446 § 614 [b][6][A]; § 614 [b] [2 & 3]). That relatively simple sentence is the basis for a great deal of change, possibility, and controversy, but it did not start there. The role of the federal government in funding special education, dissatisfaction with special education, an increased knowledge of learning and academic interventions, and the accountability movement in this country all contributed to RtI’s development and popularity, and all need to be discussed to understand the direction and promise of RtI.

Role of the Federal Government in Funding Special Education

When IDEA was first enacted into law, it was expected that the federal government would fund 40% of the excess cost of providing special education services. The current federal share of the cost is approximately 15 to 20%, with approximately 60% of those funds going toward students identified as learning disabled (LD). With that information in mind, prior to the 2004 IDEA reauthorization, the federal government was interested in examining ways to prevent students from experiencing significant academic failure. RtI emerged as a viable method for preventing academic failure and reducing the LD prevalence rate through universal screening for achievement difficulties, early intervention and prevention programs, and accountability for results through frequent progress monitoring.

Concerns About Special Education

Special education has been controversial since it was first mandated in 1975 (Ysseldyke, Algozzine, and Thurlow, 2000), due in large part to debates regarding the diagnostic procedures. Federal regulations for P.L. 94-142 were approved in 1977 and included the now-infamous discrepancy model in which children were identified as LD only if there were a severe underachievement as compared to the child’s intelligence. This definition of LD was the result of a compromise because there was no widely accepted or supported diagnostic model in 1977 (Gresham et al., 2004). Shortly after the regulations obtained the power of law, the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) in the U.S. Department of Education funded the Institute for Research on Learning Disabilities (IRLD) at the University of Minnesota to study LD diagnostic practices. Research from the IRLD quickly began questioning the model in place in federal and state regulations, but the funding and subsequent research occurred after the model was enacted.

Today there is consensus that the discrepancy model failed (Aaron, 1997; Fletcher et al., 1998), but RtI is only one allowable alternative approach. The federal special education regulations specify that state educational agencies (a) cannot require the use of severe discrepancy between intellectual ability and achievement for determining whether a child has an LD; (b) must permit the use of a process based on the child’s response to scientific, research-based intervention as part of the evaluation process; and (c) may permit the use of other alternative research-based procedures for determining whether a child has an LD. Some states have allowed the use of a pattern of strengths and weaknesses (PSW) approach in which cognitive and achievement profiles for individual students are examined for consistency with theoretical LD profiles.

There are several different models for PSW, but all seem to operate around four basic principles: (a) a full-scale IQ score is not needed to identify LD unless a cognitive impairment is suspected, (b) children who are identified as LD have isolated areas of weaknesses in academic and cognitive skills, (c) deficits in specific academic areas are matched with specific cognitive deficits, and (d) most cognitive abilities, and those not related to the academic deficit, are within the average range or above (Washtenaw County Specific Learning Disabilities Work Group, 2010). Advocates for the PSW approach argue that measures of cognitive processing are needed to identify LD and the resulting data can be used to develop interventions for individual students (Hale et al., 2010).

To fully evaluate the PSW model would certainly go beyond the scope of this chapter and perhaps the entire book, but recent research has questioned the diagnostic utility of cognitive processing assessments (Fletcher et al., 2011) and measures of phonological memory, verbal ability, and nonverbal ability added zero or close to zero variance beyond measures of reading (Hatcher and Hulme, 1999). Moreover, the lack of a consistent PSW model is worrisome and was a criticism of the discrepancy model as well (Dean and Burns, 2002). Finally, the lack of diagnostic and instructional utility for cognitive processing assessments was reportedly a motivational factor for the Office of Special Education Programs and the authors of IDEA legislation to allow the RtI framework. The United States Department of Education (2007) stated in a question and answer document that,

The reports of both the House and Senate Committees accompanying the IDEA reauthorization bills reflect the Committees’ concerns with models of identification of SLD that use IQ tests, and their recognition that a growing body of scientific research supports methods, such as RTI, that more accurately distinguish between children who truly have SLD from those whose learning difficulties could be resolved with more specific, scientifically based, general education interventions (p. 2).

Meta-analytic research by Kavale and Forness (1999) found small average effects for cognitive-based interventions such as perceptual training, matching a child’s modality, and psycholinguistic training, and a review of research found no relationship between aptitude and treatment outcomes (Pashler et al., 2009).

It appears that considerable research and policy guidance is needed before PSW can be used with confidence. Of course, the same statement could be said for RtI, but at least there are multiple studies that demonstrate the positive effects that RtI has on student learning (Ardoin et al., 2005; Burns, Appleton, and Stehouwer, 2005; VanDerHeyden, Witt, and Gilbertson, 2007).

Knowledge of Human Learning and Interventions

The research on student learning has greatly enhanced the knowledge base from which we practice. Meta-analytic research has identified several effective practices for struggling learners with and without disabilities (Kavale and Forness, 1999; Swanson, Hoskyn, and Lee, 1999). Perhaps more important is a line of research demonstrating the physiological effects of effective interventions. Simos and colleagues (2002) studied a group of children who were diagnosed as LD and who matched the brain activation pattern while reading of children who are LD. Children with learning disabilities tend to focus on the right hemisphere of the brain while reading, or have no clear pattern. Skilled readers tend to focus their neurological activity on the left hemisphere of the brain where language functions are centered. Simos and colleagues implemented an intervention with a strong research base and then repeated the imaging of the children while reading and found that the activity pattern had normalized. What this study demonstrated is that although we tend to focus on changing “brain chemistry” to change behavior, modifying behavior changes the chemistry and is the more plausible option in our schools. Needless to say, RtI is an attempt to improve learning by changing the behavior for individual children rather than following a traditional line of diagnosis to treatment.

Accountability Movement

The A Nation at Risk (U.S. Department of Education, 1983) report led to dramatic changes in American education by emphasizing a need for educational reform and leading to an increased interest in educational accountability (Ravitch, 1999). Salvia and Yssledyke (2001) defined accountability as documentation for people in authority that “desired goals are being met” (p. 644). Prior to the amendments to IDEA in 1997, desired goals were not specified for children with disabilities, but that changed when it was mandated that children who participated in special education participate in state accountability tests.

Although RtI was born in special education law, it was conceived in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB; 2001). NCLB specified that the educational skills and progress of all children be measured, including those with disabilities, those for whom English is not their native language, and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds. This emphasis on measuring student learning was consistent with the data-based decision-making movement that began in the 1970s, and was endorsed by the President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education (PCESE, 2002) because “those that get counted, count.” As a result, the 2004 version of IDEA specified that children could be diagnosed as LD if “the child fails to achieve a rate of learning to make sufficient progress to meet state-approved results in one or more of the areas identified in paragraph (a)(1) of this section when assessed with a response to scientific, research-based intervention process” (P.L. 108-446, §§ 300.309). Thus, NCLB and IDEA were inexorably and forever linked.

It is important to recognize the contextual basis for RtI in order to understand what RtI is and why we do it. The goal of RtI is not to identify children who are “truly LD” or even to improve the diagnostic procedures, but to enhance the learning of all children. The accountability movement led to an increased interest in monitoring how well children are learning; research on instruction for children with disabilities showed us our instruction for children with disabilities matters and that these children can learn, and research on special education suggested that changes were needed. The culmination of these events led to a data-based decision-making model to enhance learning for all children.

What Is it?

RtI should perhaps be conceptualized much the same way that we view positive behavior supports (PBS; Sugai and Horner, 1999) because both involve using data to better target resources to student needs. Thus, RtI involves four components: (a) systematic use of assessment data, (b) efficient allocation of resources, and (c) learning enhancement (d) for all students (Burns and VanDerHeyden, 2006). In other words, the goal is to seek instruction and intervention that will allow a child to be successful rather than identifying children for whom previous and presumed future interventions lacked success. In this approach, special education becomes the funding avenue for children whose needs are so intense that they require the resource expenditure allotted to special education.

The resource allocation model of RtI functionally places the primary jurisdiction over RtI in general education. Therefore, it is most effectively accomplished through a three-tiered model of increasing intensity of service and frequency of assessment (Tilly, 2003), all of which are operated by general education. Table 1.1 is based on Burns, Deno, and Jimerson (2007) and lists the three tiers and the activities associated with each. Tier 1 of an RtI model involves quality core instruction in general education and benchmark assessments to screen students and monitor progress in learning. Students who do not make adequate progress in general education despite a sound core reading curriculum receive additional support in Tier 2, which involves providing small-group interventions (four to six students) to approximately 15 to 20% of the student population and have a standardized component to assure efficiency.

Table 1.1 Three Tiers of Response-to-Interventions

Tier	Student Population	Description	Frequency of Assessment
1	All Students	Universal: Adherence to a research-based core curriculum in general education.	Benchmark assessment at least three times/year.
2	Approximately 15%	Targeted: Small-group (three to five students) interventions delivered as part of general education.	At least monthly progress monitoring.
3	Approximately 5%	Intensive: Individualized interventions based on problem-solving models. Could include special education services.	At least weekly progress monitoring and frequent informal classroom-based assessments.

Students who do not adequately respond to interventions provided in Tiers 1 or 2 receive daily individualized interventions for at least 30 minutes per day with at least weekly progress monitoring in Tier 3. These interventions are usually developed from a problem-analysis procedure often involving a problem-solving team, and are delivered by general education. However, if the individualized interventions required for the child to be successful are extensively resource intensive,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• About the Authors
• Chapter 1 Response-to-Intervention: What It Is and Why We Do It
• Chapter 2 Assessments Within an RtI System
• Chapter 3 Data-Based Decision Making
• Chapter 4 Schoolwide Organization to Facilitate RtI
• Chapter 5 Curriculum and Instruction for All Children: Tier 1
• Chapter 6 Intervention Strategies for a Selected Group: Tier 2
• Chapter 7 Intensive Interventions for Individual Students: Tier 3
• Chapter 8 Implementing the RtI Framework in Early Childhood Settings
• Chapter 9 Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Implementation and Tips for Getting Started
• References
• Index
• CD Contents