The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (2004) allows alternate pathways for school districts to identify and classify students with a specific learning disability (SLD). Response to Intervention (RtI) is one of the frameworks schools can use when eliminating the use of the discrepancy model. The premise of RtI posits that…

Early academic intervention programs are designed to support struggling students to assist in overcoming their challenges and having a greater chance of maintaining success throughout school. Studies reveal that children exhibiting weaknesses in emerging skills that lead to reading failure, is most prevalent in low-income communities of color…

Purpose: For speech-language pathologists (SLPs) working in schools, outcome measurement is an important element of practice, enabling us to evaluate the efficacy of our service provision and guiding future decision making, funding, and resource allocation. When selecting outcomes to measure, it is helpful to consider both the level at which…

Three-year-old children are seldom the focus in studies about supplemental early literacy instructional support. This study examines 3-year-old children's potential need for additional early literacy support, extending and replicating a previous investigation that identified prekindergarten children (i.e., 4-year-olds) in Head Start classrooms for…

Multi-tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) is an outgrowth of Response to Intervention (RtI). The various systems of support for students and school communities provided through these programs are integral to modern education and embedded in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) of 2004. While there are many benefits to…

The current study evaluated whether goal-setting practices that account for seasonal developmental patterns of reading growth decreased the number of weeks data needed to be collected in order to yield accurate response to intervention decisions for a sample of 224 third-grade students. The extent to which more complex decision-making practices…

This secondary analysis of data from a randomized control trial of an early mathematics intervention, ROOTS, explored whether patterns of intervention response were best categorized by the typical response/non-response binary or a more complex framework with additional response profiles. Participants included kindergarten students at risk for…

This response to intervention study examined agreement between classification methods of preschool children's responsiveness to Tier 2 intervention using level of performance (25th percentile), growth (equivalent to small and medium effect sizes), and both level of performance and growth in a dual-discrepancy approach. Overall, 181 children…

This paper updates a review of dynamic assessment in education by the first author, published in this journal in 2003. It notes that the original review failed to examine the important conceptual distinction between dynamic testing (DT) and dynamic assessment (DA). While both approaches seek to link assessment and intervention, the former is of…

In this technical report, we present results of classification accuracy analyses to identify cut scores to optimize sensitivity and specificity for the easyCBM literacy assessments in Kindergarten through Grade 2. In conducting these analyses, we used the following approach: We kept sensitivity above 0.80 and maximized specificity from there. If…

Response to intervention (RTI) is used as a prerequisite to referring children for special education eligibility for learning disabilities (LD). RTI provides schools with a framework for helping students with learning challenges. In the United States, while the number of students receiving services through RTI has remained consistent, the overall…

The Strategic Universal Design for Learning Course Development (S-UDLCD™) Faculty & Institutional Evaluation System (2023) is a research-based framework for assessing faculty performance, enhancing student retention, and improving institutional effectiveness. Unlike traditional models, this system integrates predictive analytics, student…

This technical report is an addendum to a study we initially reported on in 2014 (Wray, Lai, Saez, Alonzo, & Tindal, 2014). In response to a request for additional analyses, in particular reporting confidence intervals around the results, we re-analyzed the data from the Wray et al study. This supplementary report presents the results of the…

We use administrative data to measure whether attending a charter school in Denver, Colorado, reduces the likelihood that students are newly classified as having a disability in primary grades. We employ an observational approach that takes advantage of Denver's Common Enrollment System, which allows us to observe each school that the student…

Purpose: This study sought to identify an adequate intensity of interactive book reading for new word learning by children with specific language impairment (SLI) and to examine variability in treatment response. Method: An escalation design adapted from nontoxic drug trials (Hunsberger, Rubinstein, Dancey, & Korn, 2005) was used in this Phase…