Running Head: RTI AND THE STRUGGLING BEGINNING READER
Response to Intervention and the Struggling Beginning Reader
Lisa Y. Jones
East Carolina University
READ 6418
RTI AND THE STRUGGLING BEGINNING READER
Abstract
Response to Intervention is an educational practice that involves providing struggling
readers with series of early interventions in order to help them progress. This paper
examines research on factors involved in successful literacy intervention at the
kindergarten and first grade levels: timing, group size, intervention leader, and literacy
skills addressed. It also looks at what might predict a lack of responsiveness as well as
implications for instruction.
Keywords: Response to Intervention, struggling reader, kindergarten, first grade
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In any given year, a teacher has the potential to encounter students with a wide
range of reading abilities, some of whom are struggling to be successful. This is true of all
grade levels, but is especially true in the earliest grades as students are affected by their
level of experience before coming to school. In order to provide effective instruction for
these beginning readers, many teachers are turning to a Response to Intervention (RTI)
framework. The premise behind RTI is that students’ reading difficulties are recognized
early and teachers use a tiered series of increasingly intensive interventions to help them
catch up to their on-grade level peers. The interventions often include longer or more
frequent instruction in smaller groupings, which are systematic and explicit in nature
(Fuchs & Fuchs, 2006). It is a form of dynamic assessment (Gersten & Dimino, 2006), so
through consistent monitoring teachers are able to determine if the instruction at each level
is helping their struggling readers succeed. Several factors are involved in making the
more intensive tiers as effective as possible for early readers, including timing of the
intervention, who is providing the instruction, size of the group, and which areas of literacy
are being targeted. This paper will explore information and research relating to these
factors at the kindergarten and first grade level.
Timing of the Intervention
Timing can be one key to success when it comes to early literacy intervention.
Starting too late can mean missing a valuable window to correct early reading problems
before they have gone too far. According to a widely cited study conducted by Juel (1988),
a student who is a good reader at the end of first grade is likely to stay a good reader
throughout elementary school. However, a student who is struggling at the end of first
grade is not likely to catch up. This implies that intervention in kindergarten and first grade
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can help to prevent reading difficulties in the future. Several studies have found positive
results from reading intervention beginning in kindergarten (O’Connor, Bocian, Sanchez &
Beach, 2012; Vadasy & Sanders, 2008; Whiteley, Smith & Connors, 2007). Researchers
have determined beginning in kindergarten was preferable to beginning in first grade
(O’Connor et al., 2012). Even the time of implementation within the kindergarten year can
make a difference as Cooke, Kretlow and Helf (2009) showed when students in a beginning
of the year intervention outperformed students starting the reading protocol in mid-year.
Furthering the idea of an early start, Wanzek and Vaughn (2010) suggest that intervention
beginning in second and third grades is not as successful as earlier implementation due to
the fact that the reading difficulties are more complex, and specific research has confirmed
the idea (O’Connor, 2012).
A contradiction to the concept of starting interventions as early as kindergarten is
the fact that looking at these students for reading difficulties can be troublesome.
Screening measures used in kindergarten do not tend to be as precise as assessments in the
higher grades (Gersten & Dimino, 2006). This could mean false positives and providing
reading intervention for students who do not really need it. On the opposite end of the
spectrum, kindergarten screenings tend to be based on letter knowledge and phoneme
segmentation and may not catch students with reading problems that develop later as
reading gets more challenging (O’Connor et al., 2012). These researchers determined that,
when it comes to predicting reading difficulties, how a child is reading at the beginning of
first grade is more accurate than early kindergarten assessments.
Assuming the time during which students will require reading intervention has
passed can also cause problems. Gersten and Dimino (2006) suggest that those who
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support RTI surmise that when proficiency in reading is attained by the end of first grade it
will continue. While that can be true as found by Vadasy, Sanders and Abbott (2008), it is
not always the case. A study by Jesson and Limbrick (2014) determined that while a
majority of students successfully completing a literacy intervention by the end of first grade
continued to be at or near grade level in third, fourth and fifth grade, forty percent were
now below grade level. Similarly, O’Conner et al. (2012) found about a third of the
students in their study did not present literacy skills low enough to qualify for intervention
until second grade. This may mean that students need reading intervention even after the
early years.
Size of the Intervention Group
The number of students working in the same group can have an impact on the
success of reading intervention. Small group instruction has been shown to work well
when beginning readers require a moderate level of intervention (Cooke et al., 2009;
O’Connor et al., 2012). Wanzek and Vaughn (2010) noted as group size increases the
effects of the literacy intervention decreases. Individual sessions are commonly used for
students requiring a more intense level of reading assistance (Wanzek & Vaughn, 2010),
with Whiteley et al. (2007) positing the reason for greater success at the individual level
could be due to personal issues, attention span and/or socioemotional factors. However,
research by Vadasy and Sanders (2008) has shown that working with students in pairs can
be as effective as working with students in a one on one setting, often increasing
motivation and enjoyment for the students.
Leader of the Intervention
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It is generally thought that the people who provide early Tier 2 and Tier 3
interventions should possess high levels of expertise in the field of reading, such as
classroom teachers and reading specialists (Fuchs & Fuchs, 2006; Wanzek & Vaughn,
2010). However, research has shown that successful interventions have been led by teacher
assistants and tutors (Vadasy & Sanders, 2008; Vadasy et al., 2008). There were several
similar characteristics found in these two studies. First of all, the paraprofessionals worked
with no more than two students at a time. Vadasy and Sanders (2008) acknowledge that
further studies would be required to determine how many students a paraprofessional could
successfully handle. The assistants and tutors also received several hours of training on the
intervention protocol they would be leading and were subject to fidelity checks and
ongoing coaching and modeling from the research staff. Lastly, the intervention programs
used were highly scripted, helping to maintain fidelity. One thing pointed out in a study
using paraprofessionals to lead interventions was that as students were found to be less
responsive, it may have been beneficial to have the reading intervention provided by staff
members with a higher level of expertise (Vadasy et al., 2008) .
Literacy Components of Intervention
Perhaps because it is a known predictor of reading ability, much research has been
done on intervention at the kindergarten level involving explicitly-taught phonemic
awareness skills, and how it benefits the literacy skills of struggling readers both in the
present as well as in future grades. Interventions involving strictly phonemic awareness
tend to improve young students’ word identification and fluency (O’Connor et al., 2012) as
well as spelling and comprehension (Vadasy & Sanders, 2008; Whiteley et al., 2007).
Results of these interventions may only last through the beginning of second grade when
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some students begin to show the need for assistance with decoding multisyllabic words and
comprehension, skills they may not have needed in the earlier grades (O’Connor et al.,
2012).
In first grade, interventions tend to involve phonemic awareness as well as other
components. Fitting with the research summary by Wansek and Vaughn (2010) in which
they noticed that the most effective interventions had students reading text at their reading
level along with phonics components, Vadasy et al. (2008) included oral reading practice in
the phonemic awareness intervention in their study. They found higher results in decoding,
word reading, spelling, comprehension and fluency, all lasting through the end of third
grade. Lane, Pullen, Hudson and Konold (2009) included oral reading, manipulative word
work and writing, and saw an increase in students’ phonological awareness, sight word
knowledge and decoding. They also determined that when word work and writing were
removed the intervention was not as successful. Those students did not perform any better
than the control group in word recognition or decoding.
Predictors of Lack of Responsiveness to Phonological Intervention
Several studies have looked into factors that might predict the progress of an early
phonological intervention. According to these studies, children who were unresponsive to
intervention also had low oral vocabulary skills and letter knowledge (Ouellette and Haley,
2013; Whiteley et al., 2007) as well as receptive language (Vadasy et al., 2008). Ouellette
and Haley (2013) determined while alphabetic knowledge was only important in
kindergarten, the effects of deficits in oral language continued into first grade. Whiteley et
al. (2007) suggest vocabulary intervention for children struggling with phonological
awareness at the kindergarten level.
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Reflection
As the Title I reading specialist in my building, I am typically the “expert” to whom
the staff turns when they have a student struggling with reading. Since last year was my
first year in the position, I used my best professional judgment to help plan and implement
reading interventions across several grade levels. The whole time I had the idea in mind
that in the near future I would only be doing interventions at the kindergarten and first
grade levels because I would get the students caught up by the end of first grade and they
would not need any more intervention. I had read the Juel (1988) research which found
good readers at the end of first grade staying good readers and I made remediation by the
end of first grade my goal for my students. This was the reason for choosing early grade
level Response to Intervention as my paper topic. Now that I have read additional research,
I see that is a goal I need to adjust. I would like to help as many struggling readers as I can
as early as possible, but also know that I need to work with classroom teachers to engage in
the consistent monitoring that will help us catch students who start to have difficulties in
the upper grades, either again or for the first time.
I also learned that what I thought was the best timing for kindergarten intervention
is certainly not best practice. Last year the kindergarten teachers and I decided not to begin
literacy interventions for their students until mid-way through the year, after they had time
to adjust to routines and instruction. We were thinking they would miss out on vital
readiness skills being taught in the classrooms while I was doing pull-out. I now know that
these students will get the most benefit from beginning early in the year and there is no
reason to hold back. I do not have to make sure they know most of their letters before they
go on to anything else. I look forward to seeing the difference this makes next year.
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I am the only staff member in my building whose primary purpose is providing
literacy intervention. I work with small groups all day long, but even with that type of
schedule I can not get to all of the children who need reading assistance. Last year my
principal decided I needed some help and she enlisted other people from within the
building to work with small groups of struggling readers for part of the day. I trained these
tutors in the intervention strategies we use, but never checked in to see if they were
following the procedures correctly. I found that to be an important part of the research on
using paraprofessionals successfully, that there were fidelity checks and coaching on ways
to alter the intervention to fit the students throughout the process in order to ensure a high
level of effectiveness. This type of coaching is something on which I can improve in the
future.
The part of the RTI research I found most enjoyable was reading about the different
components used in interventions. It confirmed some of what I have been doing in using a
well-balanced series of explicitly taught lessons including both leveled reading and phonics
components. One part that was neglected, however, was making the word work truly
interactive and manipulative through activities such as word sorts and building words with
magnetic letters. The students did much more writing of words than they did interacting
with them. With research showing interventions including manipulative word work as
more successful than the same intervention without it, I can see this is something that needs
to be added. I am hoping to combine the knowledge of how beneficial this can be with
instructional techniques learned in the Applied Phonics class I took to make the
interventions as effective as possible.
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The idea that vocabulary is a predictor of the success of phonological interventions
was new to me and I still have lingering questions about using vocabulary intervention to
help less responsive students. Whiteley et al. (2007) were very specific in stating
interactive storybook reading could be a useful tool, but I would be interested in seeing if
other research shows read aloud to be a good use of very limited intervention time. This is
a topic I plan to continue exploring in order to determine vocabulary practices that might
work well in a small group early intervention setting.
As a new interventionist, it was helpful to synthesize the research on Response to
Intervention in kindergarten and first grade. It confirmed several intervention practices we
were already using, gave me ideas to adjust the timing and components of my early
intervention sessions, and caused me to acknowledge that my role as coach is something I
should take more seriously. It also led me to a new area of interest, small group vocabulary
intervention, which I plan to continue to research in order to make my intervention
practices reach as many struggling early readers as possible.
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References
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