A Framework for Building Capacity for Responsiveness to Intervention

Abstract

Within the context of a multilayered prevention system, responsiveness to intervention (RTI) integrates increasingly intensive instruction and, at each layer, employs assessment to identify students who are inadequately responsive and who therefore require intervention at the next, more intensive layer in the system. Over the past decade, RTI has emerged as a promising model of service delivery at the elementary grades, with behavior and reading receiving the greatest amount of systematic attention by researchers and practitioners. At the elementary grades, primary prevention is typically conceptualized as instruction in the general education classroom. Only children who fail to respond to this universal core program enter secondary prevention that, in most research-based versions of RTI, involves scientifically validated small-group tutoring. Students who show poor response to this second, more intensive, and standardized form of intervention are considered to have a need for even greater intensity at the tertiary level. Given the student's failure to respond to a validated standard tutoring protocol, tertiary intervention typically involves an individualized program formulated inductively to meet the student's unique needs. In many but not all systems, tertiary intervention is conducted under the auspices of special education, given the student's need for individualized rather than standard programming and given the expense and expertise required for individualized programming. In this regard, we note that RTI, as a multitier prevention system, is designed to prevent long-term academic and social failure, not designed to prevent special education per se. Special education, we believe, should be conceptualized as a valuable resource within the prevention system, with students entering and exiting as their progress warrants. In this way, RTI simultaneously provides a framework for preventing long-term serious difficulties, even as it offers an innovative and promising process for identifying and serving students with disabilities. RTI has been codified in federal law as an alternative to traditional methods for identification of learning disabilities, and practitioners are now struggling to build RTI models for their schools, even as the federal government invests research monies to develop and validate such practices. It therefore seems appropriate at a time of both excitement and confusion about RTI to propose a framework to guide school personnel in selecting a practice and to help researchers build a useful body of knowledge to inform that practice. In this commentary, we offer such a framework and then we consider how the articles constituting this special issue address the various questions posed in the framework. In Table 1, we present a framework for building RTI capacity. For each layer of intervention, a set of questions addresses the intervention efficacy, assessment integrity, and feasibility of an RTI model. These questions are answered separately for each performance domain (e.g., reading vs. math vs. challenging behavior) and at each grade or age level. Table 1 reveals the magnitude of the work scope for building RTI capacity in the various performance domains at the full range of age levels. We emphasize that the questions posed in Table 1 are considered with respect to RTI design issues, which include, for example, deciding how many instructional revisions occur within each layer of the prevention system (e.g., must accommodations or adaptations to primary prevention be systematically attempted and evaluated before a student progresses to secondary prevention?) or determining whether short-term progress monitoring is used to supplement universal screening before deciding on a student's risk status. The questions posed in Table 1 are used to select among these and other RTI design issues, which we discuss elsewhere. Of course, as illustrated in this special issue, many validated forms of instruction and assessment that might be incorporated into RTI designs already exist. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 83 citations exist upstream.