The purpose of this study was to determine to what extent two major specific learning disability (SLD) criteria, including a student's level of academic achievement and rate of improvement (ROI), predict multidisciplinary evaluation teams' decision-making regarding referral for special education evaluation and special education eligibility.…

The purpose of this study is to ascertain the essential elements of Response to Intervention programs among 150 high performing Title I schools with high rates of poverty as measured by free/reduced lunch participation rates. Response to Intervention (RTI) is a nationally-known instructional model used to assist students who are struggling to…

Piecewise growth models (PGMs) were used to estimate and model changes in the preliteracy skill development of kindergartners in a moderately sized school district in the Pacific Northwest. PGMs were applied to interrupted time-series (ITS) data that arose within the context of a response-to-intervention (RtI) instructional framework. During the…

Low reading skills constitute a serious achievement problem. Although there are remedial support in schools, between 2% and 6% of the student population continues to show persistent reading difficulties despite intensive intervention. The research problem in this study addressed the lack of effective reading interventions for students who were in…

In this study, we tested the outcomes of access to a response to intervention (RtI) model in kindergarten or in first grade on end-of-Grade-2 reading achievement and placement in special education. Across five schools, 214 students who began having access to Tier 2 intervention in kindergarten or first grade were compared in Grades 1 and 2 with…

Models of response to intervention (RTI) have been widely developed and implemented and have expanded to include integrated academic/behavior RTI models. Until recently, evaluation of model effectiveness has focused primarily on student-level data, but additional measures of treatment integrity within these multi-tiered models are emerging to…

Research Findings: Multitiered instructional frameworks are becoming a recommended approach for enhancing prevention and intervention efforts targeting early literacy and language skills. However, few studies to date have studied the feasibility of tiered oral language interventions before kindergarten; therefore, this pilot study explored the…

In this study, we tested the outcomes of access to a Response to Intervention (RtI) model in kindergarten or in first grade on end-of-Grade-2 reading achievement and placement in special education. Across five schools, 214 students who began having access to Tier 2 intervention in kindergarten or first grade were compared in Grades 1 and 2 with…

In the previous article in this series, the authors provided a rationale for integrating academic and behavior response to intervention (RTI) systems. Their rationale included: (1) research showing that challenges in academic and social behavior are linked; (2) a description of the common features that both RTI systems share; and (3) the…

The Full Service Schools (FSS) reform model is an inter-agency collaboration between the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), Choices, Inc., Insights Education Group and the DC Department of Mental Health. This comprehensive school reform model is based in the Response to Intervention paradigm and is designed to mitigate student academic…

Improving student performance for high-need student populations by improving the use of data in decision-making for early reading intervention programs in northwest Florida is the focus of this research to practice effort. The study is conceptually based on using a relational-feedback intervention (RFI) database model in early learning…

Reading Recovery (RR) is a widely used first grade intervention program for students who are struggling with literacy skills. With its component strategies, teacher training, high degree of fidelity of treatment, specified timeline, and cut-off score defining which students have succeeded, RR fits the problem-solving approach of the…