To Wait in Tier 1 or Intervene Immediately

Article abstract: “This randomized controlled experiment compared the efficacy of two Response to Intervention (RTI) models – Typical RTI and Dynamic RTI - and included 34 first-grade classrooms (n = 522 students) across 10 socio-economically and culturally diverse schools. Typical RTI was designed to follow the two-stage RTI decision rules that wait to assess response to Tier 1 in many districts, whereas Dynamic RTI provided Tier 2 or Tier 3 interventions immediately according to students’ initial screening results. Interventions were identical across conditions except for when intervention began. Reading assessments included letter-sound, word, and passage reading, and teacher-reported severity of reading difficulties. An intent-to treat analysis using multi-level modeling indicated an overall effect favoring the Dynamic RTI condition (d = .36); growth curve analyses demonstrated that students in Dynamic RTI showed an immediate score advantage, and effects accumulated across the year. Analyses of standard score outcomes confirmed that students in the Dynamic condition who received Tier 2 and Tier 3 ended the study with significantly higher reading performance than students in the Typical condition. Implications for RTI implementation practice and for future research are discussed.

In 2004, the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004) allowed states and local education agencies to use models of Response to Intervention (RTI) as a means of providing early intervention and identifying students as having a learning disability only after they have had effective instruction and intensive intervention. Briefly, within many RTI models, there are three tiers, with Tier 1 representing high quality general education, Tier 2 providing small group and more targeted intervention, and Tier 3 as the most intensive intervention and, in some models, special education services. Students are placed in tiers based on how well they are doing in less intensive tiers relative to grade level expectations and benchmarks using screening or progress monitoring assessments (Al Otaiba, Connor, Foorman, Greulich, & Folsom, 2009; Gersten et al. 2009).

Despite general support for multi-tier models, researchers and practitioners have expressed serious concern about the lack of research guidance for implementation. For example, despite the relatively robust evidence for Tier 2 interventions (e.g., Gersten et al., 2009; Wanzek & Vaughn, 2007), to date a fairly limited number of studies have reported effects of multi-tier intervention at the elementary level that includes what may be termed a Tier 3 intervention (Denton, Fletcher, Anthony & Francis 2006; Gilbert et al., 2013; O’Connor, Harty, & Fulmer, 2005; Vaughn, Wanzek, Linan-Thompson & Murray, 2007; Vaughn, Wanzek, Murray, Scammacca, Linan-Thompson, & Woodruff, 2009; Vellutino, Scanlon, Zhang & Schatschneider, 2008; Wanzek & Vaughn, 2010). From this set of studies, only O’Connor et al. and Gilbert et al. allowed students to move up or down tiers within a study year, whereas the remaining provided Tier 3 only after tracking response to Tier 2 for a year or more. Further, differences in how students were identified for intervention and how response was defined complicate direct comparisons across studies.

There is also a lack of guidance from a legal and policy perspective as documented in a review by Zirkel and Thomas (2010), who found marked variability in state laws and guidelines informing local education agencies about how to implement RTI. This variability about RTI procedures, particularly for Tier 3 was further validated by a survey of 40 elementary schools conducted by Mellard, McKnight, and Jordan (2010). The lack of consistency led Vaughn, Denton, and Fletcher (2010) to propose that “schools should consider placing students with the lowest overall initial scores in the most intensive interventions” (p. 442). Given that some students might be in a Tier 2 intervention that does not meet their intensive needs for too long, they argued against allowing RTI to become another type of wait to fail model, referring to historical criticisms of the IQ-achievement discrepancy model. Vaughn and her colleagues argued that immediate, intensive interventions may be the most appropriate for some students because it is increasingly possible to predict poor response by students’ pre-intervention scores (e.g., Al Otaiba & Fuchs, 2002; Nelson, Benner & Gonzalez, 2003) and because it will be very difficult for schools to achieve catch-up growth for children who are persistently weak responders (Al Otaiba & Fuchs, 2006; Denton et al., 2006; Wanzek & Vaughn, 2008).

However, there is a case to be made for waiting, so as to reduce the cost of false positives (providing intervention to students who would have responded to Tier 1). Evidence is accumulating that differentiated or individualized general education reduces the incidence of reading difficulties (Connor et al., in press). Further, Compton and colleagues have conducted an important series of studies to improve classification of which students will need Tier 3. They propose a two-stage screening within Tier 1 that might prevent (a) false positives- students receiving Tier 2 who do not really need it, (b) false negatives- students being missed for Tier 2 who really need it, and, perhaps most importantly, (c) waiting-to-fail students who are not likely to respond to Tier 2 and who immediately need the most intensive and extensive interventions (Compton et al., 2010; Compton et al., 2012; Fuchs, Fuchs, & Compton, 2012; Fuchs & Vaughn, 2012). In a study conducted at first grade (Fuchs et al., 2012), the model that best predicted who would need special education utilized six weeks of progress monitoring in Tier I using word identification fluency (WIF; L. S Fuchs, Fuchs & Compton, 2004); response to Tier 2 intervention did not add uniquely.

Finally, a recent study experimentally examined the impact of providing to first graders who made inadequate progress to Tier 2 either (a) an additional 7 weeks of Tier 2 or (b) 7 weeks of Tier 3 intervention (identical to Tier 2 intervention, but provided in one to one tutorials) (Gilbert et al., 2013). Gilbert and colleagues found no significant differences in reading outcomes between these two groups, but 7 weeks is a relatively brief intervention window and the quality of Tier 1 was not addressed. It was concerning that after following students to the end of third grade, students standard scores dropped and only 40% of the students who received the extended Tier 2 intervention and 53% of the students who received the Tier 3 intervention achieved grade level reading scores (above the 30th percentile). These findings led the authors to call for additional research that ensured good quality Tier 1 was implemented and that experimentally tested the impact of fast tracking students with the highest risk to Tier 3."

Al Otaiba S, Connor CM, Folsom JS, Wanzek J, Greulich L, Schatschneider C, Wagner RK. To Wait in Tier 1 or Intervene Immediately: A Randomized Experiment Examining First Grade Response to Intervention (RTI) in Reading. Except Child. 2014 Oct 1;81(1):11-27. doi: 10.1177/0014402914532234. PMID: 25530622; PMCID: PMC4269263.