Response to Intervention in Elementary Schools
The kindergartners sat at their desks, writing as many lowercase letters of the alphabet as they could in one minute without erasing. This was not a contest. When the students were finished, researchers took their work and coded it.
This is an example of one of the many assessments administered by Luana Greulich, her lead professor, Stephanie Al Otaiba, and a group of other researchers from Florida State University (FSU)/Florida Center for Reading Research. Their research was part of a five-year Response to Intervention (RtI) project funded by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Development that began at Kindergarten and followed students into third grade.
The grant was given to five different research centers throughout the United States and funded projects in Response to Intervention, twin studies, dyslexia, learning disabilities and other areas of education. Greulich, who has since moved to Andrews University and is now associate professor in the Department of Graduate Psychology & Counseling and the Special Education program director, worked at the Florida Center for Reading Research along with other graduate researchers in the area of reading.
RtI is a fluid model in which public school children who are doing poorly in reading or math are moved from the basic tier of general instruction to higher tiers of additional instruction, or intervention. Students in Tier 2, for example, receive 90 minutes of basic instruction (at Tier 1) with the rest of their classmates and an additional 30-45 minutes of tailored instruction twice a week (Tier 2). If students continue to struggle they are moved to Tier 3, in which they receive 45 minutes of additional instruction four–five times a week.
Children who do not respond to intervention are called “non-responders” and are considered to be “at-risk.” “By the time they reach 3rd or 4th grade, they feel like they have already been unsuccessful for two years. So we were anxious to see whether we could identify at-risk students as early as first grade, and intervene with positive results (growth).”
In the model that Greulich and her associates used, students who were assessed as having made sufficient progress were moved down a tier while students who were not making progress moved up. “You are always moving students in and out of the different tiers, which is a nightmare for the schools, but it is good for the students,” she says. Typically, students are required to go
sequentially through Tier 1 and Tier 2 in order to reach Tier 3. This can take some time, and students who would have benefited from Tier 3 instruction in August may not reach Tier 3 until April. The purpose of this study was to identify the non-responders and see how they performed if they were placed directly into the indicated tier in August and moved either up or down the tiers during the school year as necessary, versus the typical RtI model of moving sequentially through the tiers.
The study performed a randomized controlled trial in which two groups of students received intervention: the regular treatment group, who went through the typical 1-2-3 model; and the dynamic group, who went directly into the indicated tier. The study followed more than 500 children in 34 classes across ten schools in Florida. The 90-minute Language Arts instruction was videotaped and coded for quality and the amounts of instruction that each child received in each area of reading. The types of instruction received (code-focused instruction and meaning-focused instruction paired with teacher/ student directed or student directed instruction) were recorded across the five main areas of reading. The instruction was shown to be of consistently high quality to rule out the possibility that students were being identified as “at-risk” due to poor instruction.
The students were assessed for their needs and then separated by criteria based on prior research into the appropriate tier according to either the typical or dynamic model. The instruction in the Tier 2 and 3 intervention groups was also videotaped and coded for quality to measure fidelity of instruction. The research team routinely assessed students as the school year continued.
Greulich met with administrators on a regular basis to go over data from the assessments and intervention sessions. Once it was clear that students were not progressing, she worked with the administration to get the children into a referral system where they were assessed for special education services. Typically, children with learning difficulties do not receive services until the 3rd or 4th grade, by which time many will have developed avoidance behaviors. In a follow-up study, Greulich examined the behavior exhibited during intervention sessions of “at risk” students. A surprising result was that marginal non-responders exhibited avoidance behaviors (such as shame, hopelessness and anxiety) to a much greater extent than the very low non-responders.
In 2004, the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) mandated that public schools identify children who may have disabilities or be in need of special education services. This has sparked widespread use of Response to Intervention programs that start at the kindergarten and 1st grade level. RtI has been implemented at all grade levels, including high school, but the RtI needs are quite distinct at these different levels. Currently, there is no consistent criteria that is used for RtI. Researchers are trying to develop an assessment system that is consistent across the board and takes into consideration the differences between elementary and secondary needs with RtI.
The data collection was completed in 2012, and Greulich and her colleagues have shifted their focus to publishing their results. Since 2007, the research group has published 16 articles in journals such as Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Journal of Learning Disabilities, Exceptional Children and Early Childhood Research Quarterly. While most of the research team has moved on from Florida State, they have been able to continue collaborating thanks to email and Skype. The study has been extended for another five years to follow these students longitudinally to assess their writing skill development, under the direction of the principal investigator, Dr. Young Suk-Kim.
Greulich is continuing her research interests with RtI and following up with Young-Suk Kim to extend Greulich’s dissertation that was just published in Journal of Learning Disabilities in a special two-part RtI edition. Locally, Greulich is now working with the Berrien Regional Education Service Agency (RESA) to provide quality field experience for her special education courses working with students of all disabilities in the surrounding school systems. Greulich also hopes to work with the Berrien Springs School System, which has a unique special education population. Sixteen different languages are spoken in the Mars and Sylvester Elementary Schools of Berrien Springs, and Greulich wants to know how this impacts the special education and English language learners. “We have a lot of students who come to the school that might appear to need special education, when in fact English is their second language,” she says.
In the future, Greulich would like to establish a research center at Andrews University that would attract grants and implement significant changes in the community. “It could be a center where our graduate students could come and learn how to do research in a way that would set them up for a doctorate,” she says. One of the main goals of her research projects is to give back to the teachers, providing them with fresh ideas for instruction and piloting programs for the students. “That’s what I appreciated about our grant,” she says, “we were out with the teachers and the students working together.”