Data-Based Decision Making

| RTI Practices | Caveats and Concerns | School Examples |

Accurate implementation requires a shared understanding of options (such as choices of interventions) and the basis on which those intervention decisions are made. By having a public, objective, and normative framework of "responsiveness," "unresponsiveness" and "at-risk," school staff will have a basis for guiding their decisions. For example, when school staff and parents understand the expected growth rate of oral fluency reading rates, decisions about a student's responsiveness can be judged more accurately.

Progress monitoring is an assessment framework useful within the context of making decisions about students' performance in tiers. The value of progress monitoring data is that they are objectively based and used to inform decisions such as the following:

  • Does an intervention help students in a particular grade?
  • What is the rate of students' skill acquisition?
  • Should students continue in an intervention?
  • Should the student be regrouped with different students?
  • How many students are participating in each of the intervention tiers?
  • How many of those students are repeaters within a tier?
  • What is the student movement cycle among the tiers?
  • Are students regrouped into different placements or other instructional groupings based on the progress monitoring data?
  • Are decision rules about placement and movement in tiers (entering, continuing in, repeating, and exiting tiers) explicitly stated?

Addressing such questions is much easier when the whole school system is oriented to using data for making decisions. Thus, our recommendation is that school districts adopt a data-based management system that allows progress monitoring data and students' tier participation across time to be recorded and analyzed. If this system allows for easy, accurate data entry and querying, the instructional settings can benefit. The schools' curricular, departmental, and administrative committees should be taught how to use the database and prompted to demonstrate school effectiveness with the data that are captured.