Response to Intervention -- but What Intervention

[Bob Zenhausern]

If RTI is to be an effective way to deal with learning difficulties then the intervention must be based on an identification of the problem. I am going to outline a research study based on a Ph.D. dissertation that was later published.

An identified group of poor readers who had clear phonological deficits were compared to average readers on two simple tasks. A group of words preselected to be in the sight vocabulary of all participants were paired under two conditions. In one case the student had to say whether the words meant the same, the opposite, or were unrelated. In the second task the students had to say whether the two words rhymed.

In the semantic task there were no differences between the two groups, but the students who were labeled poor readers performed much worse on the rhyme task. Even though these students knew what the word meant and its relationship to other words, they could not pronounce the word to make a rhyme match.

The purpose of reading is to get meaning from the printed word and the all the children in the study could do that. A prime intervention to make that conversion is phonetic decoding. It is called the indirect phonological route to meaning. Look at the word, pronounce it, and from that understand it. The poor readers could not use that approach, because of the phonological deficit, but they learned to read despite it. What is ironic is that we call the way the poor readers do it without phonetic decoding as speed reading and have to pay for a course to learn it.

In this case an intervention based both on research and a defined deficit would be to use something that does not depend on the weakness of these students -- phonological decoding. A phonetic approach worked for me and for many others, but it does not work for everyone. If phonetic decoding does not work for some children, use an intervention that will avoid this problem.

[Brian Winsor]

Very interesting Bob... I was the principal for 3 years of a model RTI school for the Department of Education in Arizona. I found that some were so wrapped up in the intervention that they didn't place enough emphasis on the response data. My paraprofessional RTI team took this school from performing to highly performing in two years. The data tells me that it was because we focused very heavily on the response data to the intervention. If the response data was flat or declining we looked at several key variables one of which was the fidelity of the intervention. The admin team frequently checked for fidelity of the intervention and mostly the implementation ofthe intervention.
We found that these two factors were key to our success in RTI... becoming data hounds and fidelity fanatics.
I would love to hear more of your thoughts.
Brian Winsor