Carroll's Theory of School Learning
Carroll understood that time needed to learn (TNL) depended on a combination of individual difference and teacher or school mediated variables. Similar to modern day RTI proponents, and well before Heller et al., Carroll defined student 'aptitude' as time needed to learn under "optimal instructional conditions." In the parlance of RTI, we may understand "time needed to learn" in terms of "intensity" of instruction, and "optimal instructional conditions" in terms of "treatment validity." It is important to note that Carroll discriminated between aptitude, which could be expressed unambiguously only under optimal instructional conditions, and ability, which represented the capacity of student-learners to understand instruction. Current proposals concerning RTI address the former but not the latter. Carroll also viewed "perseverance" as a critical within-learner attribute that determined TNL; that is, the time students were motivated to engage in active learning even if instruction was otherwise optimal.
Carroll's was a model of school, not individual, learning. That is, he was concerned with the interaction of individual differences and the actual conditions of teaching and learning in their institutional setting. His concern led him to posit two additional determinants of TNL, opportunity to learn (OTL) and quality of instruction.
Opportunity to learn is not under student, and often not fully under teacher, control. In Carroll's model, it represents a resource allocation of time that is sufficient for each student, but as I will discuss in the following sections, it also represents a significant resource allocation to teachers not only by the schools in which they work but also by the professional preparation programs in which future teachers are students themselves. Quality of instruction, in Carroll's model, did not refer only to effective instruction, but also to how efficiently instruction is presented. High quality would mean that no more time is spent in instruction than that which is necessitated by the aptitude of learners.
Herein, of course, is the RTI's fatal flaw. It does not take a theoretical stance with regard to variables that account for how schools and teachers within schools manage differences in responsiveness to instruction (e.g., see Cook, Semmel, & Gerber, 1997; Gerber, 1995; Larrivee, Gerber, & Semmel, 1997). Either as a concept of more effective teaching or, its more ambitious aim, identification of students with learning disabilities, RTI proposals provide only operational procedures that serve to define specific learner differences -- i.e., responsiveness to standardized instruction. Additionally, although some important (Speece, Case, & Malloy, 2003; Torgesen, Alexander, Wagner, Rashotte, Voeller, & Conway, 2001;Vaughn, Linan-Thompson, & Hickman, 2003) research on RTI has been done, we have little idea of the actual extent, or cost, of the systemic changes it implies (e.g., see Denton, Vaughn, & Fletcher, 2003; King & Torgesen, 2000), including such fundamentals as baseline preparation of classrooms, implementation of curriculum and instruction improvements, construction of assessment procedures for selection of students at risk, provision and quality control of increasingly intensive intervention for students defined as non-responders.
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