Are Individual Differences in Response to Intervention Influenced by the Methods and Measures Used to Define Response? Implications for Identifying Children With Learning Disabilities

Abstract

Response to intervention (RTI) has been promoted for nearly 20 years as a valid supplement to or alternative method of learning disability (LD) identification. Nevertheless, important unresolved questions remain about its role in disability identification. We had two purposes when conducting this study of 229 economically and racially diverse poor readers in Grades 4 and 5 in 28 public elementary and middle schools in Nashville. First, we examined predictors of the children’s response to a reading comprehension tutoring program. Second, we explored the utility of different methods (growth vs final status) and measures (near- and mid-transfer vs far-transfer) in operationalizing “response,” and whether these contrasting methods and measures identified similar children. Findings indicated students with higher pretreatment scores on expressive vocabulary, nonverbal IQ, teacher ratings of attention, and reading comprehension measures were more likely classified as responsive with final status methods. Students with lower pretreatment comprehension scores were more likely identified as responsive with growth methods. These and other findings suggest “response” is strongly context dependent, raising questions about the validity of RTI as a means of disability identification.

Predicting and Evaluating Treatment Response: Evidence Toward Protracted Response Patterns for Severely Impacted Students With Dyslexia

“…The operationalization of treatment response must be carefully considered, as the method used impacts observed rates of response and associated predictors (Al Otaiba & Fuchs, 2002; Barth et al, 2008; Hendricks & Fuchs, 2020). Dichotomization is often used in the response literature to classify students as having adequate or inadequate response.…”

“…Grouping students at the end of treatment according to whether reading skill has normalized (i.e., SS ≥ 90; Torgesen et al, 2001) is educationally meaningful, as this threshold typically determines whether or not students receive additional treatment. In addition, cut point and continuous growth methods of determining response are more likely to identify response in cases with high and low baseline performance, respectively (Hendricks & Fuchs, 2020). Although neither method is admittedly ideal for measuring response, the use of posttreatment cut points reflects the circumstances under which children are deemed eligible for additional services.…”

The Use of Neuronal Response Signals as Early Biomarkers of Dyslexia

“…RTI can be difficult to implement with fidelity since it requires school personnel to be highly knowledgeable in the use of comprehensive screeners and evidence-based interventions (Balu et al, 2015). In addition, an RTI framework has not yet shown to be a reliable and valid approach to identifying dyslexia (Hendricks & Fuchs, 2020). Due to the limitations highlighted with each of these methods, a consensus on dyslexia identification based on behavioral approaches has yet to be validated (National Association of School Psychologists [NASP], 2022).…”

Implementing Response to Intervention (RtI) in a Juvenile Detention Center Using Action Research

“…Danielson et al (2007) and others stated there were many questions left unanswered, but the state of knowledge seems stuck in time. RtI lacks a coherent, universal definition and implementation, and many researchers found RtI transformed the nature of diagnoses of learning disabilities (Hendricks & Fuchs, 2020). Within juvenile detention centers, delinquents have poor behavior and academic performance which affect outcomes across the lifespan, but the causality or direction of each was not clearly defined (Katsiyannis et al, 2008;Kulkarni et al, 2020).…”