Mixed Messages on RTI

Responsiveness-to-Intervention (RTI) is a topic that has educators divided.  Some may see the strategy as yet another instance of a teacher's autonomy and professional discretion being eroded.  Others may find it a useful tool for getting help to at-risk students quickly.  But as Dr. Jennifer Gilbert pointed out on Voice of Literacy in October, RTI isn't going anywhere anytime soon with a number of states now mandating its use.

In a paper written with her colleague, Dr. Donald Compton, Gilbert studied the efficacy of a 14-week RTI program involving 649 first-graders.  The study utilized three tiers of instruction.  Tier 1 was general instruction.  Of the 649 students, 212 were identified as "unresponsive" to the general-education setting.  Of these, 78 remained in that setting, and the other 134 were assigned to Tier 2 where they received small-group instruction, typically three times per week.  Of the 134 students assigned to Tier 2, 45 were identified as unresponsive to that instruction.  Of these 45, 21 stayed on in Tier 2, and 24 were assigned to Tier 3 and received one-on-one instruction fives day per week.  So the final composition of the students was:

Tier 1:  437 responsive, 78 unresponsive
Tier 2:  110 responsive, 21 unresponsive
Tier 3:  24 students

The results don't offer much in the way of settling the RTI debate.  Even the two researchers themselves seem unsure of how they feel about RTI. The paper's abstract states that Tier 2 students "made significantly higher word reading gains" compared with the non-responders who remained in Tier 1.  However, in the Voice of Literacy interview, Gilbert characterizes the effect as small and says that these modest gains dissipated quickly.  The situation for Tier 3 students is much more dire: these students saw no gains when compared to non-responders left in Tier 2.

But when asked for recommendations for parents, teachers, principals, and policy-makers, the two researchers still generally advocate the use of RTI even as they claim that their results challenge the model.  Gilbert postulates that possibly the method and timing of intervention offered at Tier 3 were not effective.  Possibly some variation on the one-on-one, five-times-per-week intervention would have yielded more promising results.  Furthermore, Gilbert suggests that a 14-week period of intervention is perhaps too short a time.  But taking these two considerations into account, longer periods of intervention and larger groups of students (larger than one anyway), one notices that this type of RTI starts to look a lot like the old tracking model that RTI is, in part, meant to move away from.

So while the efficacy of RTI remains in doubt, there is at least one silver lining: unlike previous methods of recognizing learning disability, RTI, when properly implemented, does not assume that because a child doesn't know something, the child can't know something.  According to Gilbert, prior to RTI, a student's lack of knowledge in a particular area might have indicated a learning disability.  With RTI, the student is supposed to be examined on the basis of how she or he apprehends new knowledge, not on the basis of whether she or he comes to class with certain knowledge.  RTI then distinguishes between learning disability and a lack of educational opportunity.  In this respect at least, it is an improvement.


UPDATE:  I just came across this:

After years of research working with proficient and struggling readers, Marie Clay developed Reading Recovery as an early intervention program. Reading Recovery teachers train extensively to work with the lowest 20 percent of children in first grade. They provide thirty-minute daily lessons to individual children. The majority (75 percent) of students reach grade level standards in just twelve to twenty weeks. Reading Recovery has had amazing results worldwide. Tens of thousands of teachers have been trained, and 1.7 million first graders have become successful readers, having accelerated their learning to reach the average reading level of their classmates. It should be noted that these numbers also include children who are labeled learning disabled.

Pat Johnson. Catching Readers Before They Fall: Supporting Readers Who Struggle, K-4 (Kindle Locations 323-327). Kindle Edition. 

I am not quite sure what the implication is in comparing these two programs.  The duration is comparable (14 weeks compared to 12 to 20), and the method of Reading Recovery very much like that of Gilbert's RTI (half an hour of one-on-one instruction).  Could a possible conclusion be that perhaps the 75% of the bottom fifth of readers who respond to Reading Recovery would also have responded to small group instruction like that received in Tier 2, differing only in how much previously lost ground students made up for?  What about the 5% (25% of 20%) of all students who are unresponsive to Reading Recovery as compared with the approximately 3.7% (26 out of 649) of students who were unresponsive to any kind of intervention in Gilbert's program?  What is going on with these kids?