Making Decisions About Adequate Progress in Tier 2

Posted by Beth DuBose on Jan 21, 2010

This article, by Douglas Dexter and Dr. Charles Hughes of Penn State University, discusses the identification of students not progressing adequately in Tier 2 of an RTI model, and provides recommendations to improve Tier 2 instruction and identify those students needing Tier 3 interventions.

Because a lot of states are considering Tier 3 interventions Special Education or a step to refer to Special Education, the success of students in Tier 2 is critical in decreasing the number of students referred to Special Education for specific learning disabilities.

As indicated in the article:

"D. Fuchs and Deshler (2007) estimate that the number of students, based on the assumption of a normal distribution, who do not show improvement in response to the increasingly intensive Tier 2 interventions and are moved into Tier 3 should fall between 2% and 7% of the general population. However, there is no clear methodological definition of how or when a student is to be identified as a nonresponder to intervention, what intervention is to be used, who is to deliver the intervention, or how nonresponsiveness is to be measured. This lack of clarity creates the potential for inconsistencies in identification of students not progressing adequately in Tier 2 and for highly variable prevalence rates at the school, district, state, and national levels (D. Fuchs et al., 2008)."

The article discusses six methods that are currently being promoted for identification of students struggling in Tier 2: a) dual discrepancy, b) median split, c) final normalization, d) final benchmark, e) slope discrepancy, and (f) exit groups. A description of each method and the data gathered on percentages of struggling students in Tier 2 through each method is provided in the article.