RTI: Decision Rules

RTI: Decision Rules

Methods to Determine a Student’s Expected Level of Achievement

Methods to Determine a Student’s Expected Level of Achievement • Local Norms. One method for determining the skill level required for school success is to sample the academic abilities of ‘typical’ students at specific grade levels in a school or district. The resulting data can be compiled into local norms. An advantage of local norms is that they will show with precision the skill gap between a struggling student and his or her classmates. A potential drawback of local norms, however, is that these norms can vary substantially across districts and even across schools within districts. Districts can take certain steps (e.g., aggregating local norms from across the district to create ‘district norms’) to adjust for differences in average academic performance between schools. However, those steps can only minimize—not eliminate—the potential for significant differences in average performance between schools.

Methods to Determine a Student’s Expected Level of Achievement • Research Norms. Some research studies have collected data on ‘typical’ rates of academic performance or other instructionally relevant behavior from samples of students and published that data in the form of ‘research norms’. RTI Teams find such pre-existing research norms to be convenient to use. While research norms can be a helpful starting point in estimating expected levels of student performance, though, they should generally be used cautiously. One limitation to some research norms, for example, is that they are based on small samples of students and therefore may not reflect a ‘true’ picture of average student performance across the nation. Another possible drawback of research norms is that the groups of students used in these studies are not representative of the racial and ethnic diversity of student populations in specific school districts—limiting the usefulness of those norms to these districts’ RTI decision-making.

Selected Research-Based Norms for Academic Skills and Related Behaviors (pp. 181-182)

Methods to Determine a Student’s Expected Level of Achievement • Criterion-Referenced Benchmarks. Homework completion, reading comprehension, and knowledge of higher-level math operations are just three examples of academic competencies for which schools are unlikely to have norms. When faced with a lack of clear-cut norms (e.g., homework completion, reading comprehension, or knowledge of higher-level math operations), the RTI Team can work with the referring teacher to set a criterion-referenced benchmark—that is, an assessment that compares a student’s performance on an academic task or behavior to a pre-selected standard of mastery (e.g., Fuchs & Fuchs, 2006).A disadvantage of criterion-referenced benchmarks is that they can be somewhat arbitrary, often based largely on teacher judgment. An advantage of such benchmarks, however, is that they can be applied flexibly to a very wide range of student academic skills and behaviors for which formal peer norms are unavailable.

Closing the Gap: Calculating Expected Rates of Student Progress

Methods to Calculate Expected Rates of Student Progress • Growth Norms Based on Research. While scarce, some research articles have been published that track average rates of student progress in basic academic skills over time. Research-based norms are convenient but may be based on small sample sizes. Still, when available, they can be helpful starting points for calculating expected student rates of growth.

Methods to Calculate Expected Rates of Student Progress • Growth Estimates Based on Distance Between Target Student Performance and Local Norms. If a school or district has compiled its own local norms (for example, in curriculum-based measurement oral reading fluency), the grade norms of a student with academic delays represent the goal toward which that student will work. If for example, a school’s local norms indicate that the typical reading rate in 4th-grade text is 73 words per minute in that building, then this figure may be used as the ultimate goal for a 4th grade student who has deficits in reading fluency. The RTI Team would calculate a rate of weekly improvement that the student must achieve to allow that student ultimately to catch up with his or her peers.

Methods to Calculate Expected Rates of Student Progress • Growth Rates Based on Criterion-Referenced Benchmarks. If criterion-referenced benchmarks are set as goals for student performance, then these benchmarks become the goal toward which the student works. The RTI Team and referring teacher would set weekly rates of student improvement sufficiently ambitious to help the student to achieve the benchmark within a reasonable period of time.For example, a teacher may refer a student to the RTI Team because she turns in homework on average only 40 percent of the time. Based on the grading formula for the course, the teacher estimates that the student will receive a passing grade if she manages to turn in at least 80 percent of assigned homework. So the RTI Team and teacher adopt this homework completion goal of 80 percent as a criterion-referenced benchmark and intervention goal. They agree to try a homework intervention for 8 weeks. The expectation is that the student will increase homework completion by at least 5 percent per week until the student reaches the goal of 80 percent.

Methods to Determine a Student’s Expected Level of Achievement • Growth Rates Based on Criterion-Referenced Benchmarks. (Cont.)For more advanced academic tasks, the referring teacher and team may want to: • Create a step-by-step checklist that breaks the global task into clearly defined essential sub-steps. • Write a rubric that evaluates the student’s performance on each sub-step. The RTI Team would set a goal for the student based on the checklist. For example, a student may have a checklist to guide preparation and writing of the assignments. One goal for the student at the end of the intervention period might be to have at least 80 percent of his or her writing assignments meet minimal requirements using the checklist and rubric. Another goal might be tied to have the student attain passing grades on at least 80 percent of those assignments.

When Does the RTI Team Refer a Student to Special Education?

Evaluating the Intervention Plan of the ‘Non-Responding’ Student pp. 183-184

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RTI: Decision Rules