Review of “Diagnosis: The Missing Ingredient in RTI Assessment”
By Marjorie Y. Lipson with Pam Chomsky-Higgins and Jane Kanfer
RTI (Response to Interventions) is an approach to identifying students as learning disabled. It is also intended to reduce the number of students with reading difficulties. Standard Protocol intervention treats all the students as if they all are the same. Assessment for struggling readers is missing.
In Vermont the authors have worked with several schools to improve literacy by reassessing how to use the diagnostic data they had. They began to use more specific areas of reading: word recognition, fluency, and comprehension to construct profiles of student difficulties. The focus was on what type of difficulty was the most common. This could be different in each school.
Research –based intervention plans appropriate for each student what Dorn and Henderson call a “portfolio of interventions.” The results were excellent.
The lesson here is that we do not necessarily need to spend a lot of time or resources on testing children. Teachers and others in the schools may already have assessment information available, which can and should be better used to help students who are struggling readers.
We do have a wealth of information about students. I sometimes wonder if the key ingredient is finding the time to analyze what we have, and plan purposeful instruction to move students to the next level.
ReplyDelete