During the past several years, one of the most frequently addressed topics at conferences and in professional journals is responsiveness to intervention (RTI). This is because it is viewed by many as a new way to think about both early intervention and disability identification. Despite its relative newness, a subset of RTI proponents contend researchers and practitioners know everything they need to know to implement it effectively. We disagree and argue that the smartest and most responsible way to move forward with RTI implementation is to recognize what all of us collectively do know and do not know. In this article, we identify unresolved issues-general and specific-important to RTI implementation, teacher effectiveness, and student achievement.Requests for reprints should be sent to Doug Fuchs, 328 Peabody, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37203. Electronic inquiries may be sent to doug.fuchs@vanderbilt.edu.

The purpose of this descriptive study was to examine the component reading skills of adolescent struggling readers attending urban high schools. Specifically, 11 measures of reading skills were administered to 345 adolescent readers to gain a research-based perspective on the reading skill profile of this population. Participants were assessed in the domains of word level, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Analysis of the results found that 61% of the struggling adolescent readers had significant deficits in all of the reading components listed above. Subgroups of struggling readers showed similar but more severe patterns. For example, students with learning disabilities scored significantly below the levels of the struggling reader group at large. In contrast, most proficient readers scored high on all measures of reading with above-average component reading skills in word level, vocabulary, and comprehension. The lowest skill area for the proficient reader group was fluency, where they scored at the average level. Implications for policy and instructional programming are discussed.

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A previous meta-analysis indicated that eight instructional factors--Questioning, Sequencing and Segmentation, Skill Modeling, Organization and Explicit Practice, Small-Group Setting, Indirect Teacher Activities (e.g., homework), Technology, and Scaffolding-captured the majority of successful intervention programs for adolescents with learning disabilities (LD). Most important was the Organization/Explicit factor, which contributed significant variance (16%) to effect size. This factor included two important instructional components: advance organization and explicit practice. In this article, we convert these findings into practical guidelines to direct instructional practice.