Method
Participants
The principals of two low and middle income urban schools and all general (n=16), remedial (n = 2), and special education teachers (n = 2) agreed to participate. The cohorts of children began with just over 100 children per grade in each condition (Control, Tier 1, Tiers 2 and 3), with about 12% attrition over the four years. Less than 2% of children in these schools were English language learners.
School 1 is located in an industrial area of a city in the NE that draws from very low SES and middle income communities. Fewer than 10% of the parents report any college education. Ethnicity statistics are 12% African American, 7% Hispanic, 9% Native American, and 72% Caucasian. This school employs two full-time special educators who work primarily with children who have learning disability (LD), mild mental retardation (MR), and emotional disturbance (SED), along with two full-time Title 1 teachers who assist children in inclusive classes, as well as provide pull-out small group reading instruction. From 1998-2000, 15% of the school population received special education services. School 2 is a university affiliated laboratory school located in an urban environment. Many of the children's parents are highly educated and most pay tuition for their children to attend, although 12% are supported through tuition aid. The ethnicity statistics are 15% African American, 57% Caucasian, and 28% Other. In 2000, a remedial reading specialist provided services in reading to 18% of children in the primary grades.
Tier 1: Professional Development
During the first three years, teachers in participating grades, teaching assistants, and principals participated annually in three full-day (September, November, and March) and four 2-hour professional development sessions (October, December, February, and May) about research-based strategies for promoting reading acquisition.
The first year included only staff who worked with children in Grades K-1. An additional grade was added each year (i.e., K-2 in Year 2, K-3 in Year 3). The content of these sessions shifted across years as teachers of students in later grades were added to the intervention participants. Each session began with the research evidence for emphasizing particular components of reading and continued with models of activities for teaching each component (e.g., phonemic awareness, phonics, and vocabulary in K-1; the alphabetic principle, vocabulary, word study and fluency in Grades 1-2; multisyllabic word approaches and comprehension strategies in Grades 2-3). Teachers met in grade level groups across schools to discuss activities, instructional changes, and timelines for implementation. Although we taught teachers to use specific strategies and instructional activities (e.g., segmenting, group responding, word analysis, main idea generation), teachers continued to use the same background reading materials throughout the four years of the study.
Professional development (PD) also included information on assessment of reading progress and how to interpret assessment results for students on these measures. Teachers received printouts of their class roster with each child's scores across each measure over time. The researchers suggested benchmarks for average performance, and teachers tried to match instructional activities to their students' needs as suggested by the measures. In the weeks between inservice, we dropped in on teachers' classrooms to provide feedback and instructional support for making modifications. These short sessions allowed unstructured time for questions, feedback, and discussion of children's progress.
Tier 2: Small Group Instruction, 3 Days per Week
Measures collected three times each year (and more frequently for high-risk children) allowed us to determine children's responses to the least invasive layer of treatment--increases in the amount of research-based reading instruction implemented by their teachers. Because measures administered early in kindergarten tend to overselect children as "at risk," we did not begin additional tiers of intervention until after we had administered the January measures. We considered the children who named fewer than 15 letters or 10 phonemes to be at risk (e.g., Good et al., 2001; O'Connor & Jenkins, 1999), and so 31 children received Tier 2 in kindergarten. Research personnel provided instruction to these children in small groups of 2 to 4 students for 10-15 minutes 3 times per week. Instructors used smaller instructional sets and easier levels of tasks and provided more repetition to develop key concepts. By the end of the year, 9 children had caught up and stayed in the average band over the next 3 years. Two more children appeared to have caught up, but needed additional small group instruction midway through Grade 1. None of these 11 children was later diagnosed with RD.
In First Grade the following year, we provided small group instruction for 20-25 minutes three times per week to 18 children who met the at risk criteria during the September testing (i.e., less than 15 phonemes correctly segmented or 35 letters identified; At later measurement points we used standardized scores on the WRMT of < 92 or fluency rates less than the benchmarks reported in Good et al., 2001). Figure 1 shows the Tier 2 and 3 assistance provided to children from mid-kindergarten through the end of Grade 3. In first grade we used cumulative introduction to teach short vowel sounds, and supplemented classroom materials with sentences composed of decodable words. As children learned most of the letter sounds, we drew upon more meaningful reading materials with primarily decodable text, such as the Bob Books (Maslen & Maslen, 1998), storybooks from Reading Mastery I (Engelmann & Bruner, 1995), and decodable mini-books from Open Court (SRA/McGraw-Hill, 1998) to provide practice reading running text. Teaching in small groups provided many more opportunities for children to respond, to read aloud, and to receive feedback during instruction. By January, 2 of these 18 achieved average reading performance and maintained it through the end of third grade. Two additional children had demonstrated no difficulty at the end of kindergarten or beginning of first grade (i.e., their segmenting and letter knowledge developed along a typical trajectory), but were folded into Tier 2 as they developed problems related to reading words and improving fluency. By Grade 3, neither child needed additional assistance.
Figure 1. Movement among Tiers from mid-kindergarten through the end of Grade 3.
The top row represents measures over time, from K-2 (mid kindergarten) through 3-3 (end of Grade 3). Each following row represents a child who was selected in January of kindergarten as at risk for reading difficulties. An X at a time point means that scores on the measurements fell within the normal range.
| Time, from Mid-kindergarten (k-2) Through the End of Grade 3 (3-3) | ||||||||||
| K-2 | K-3 | 1-1 | 1-2 | 1-3 | 2-1 | 2-2 | 2-3 | 3-1 | 3-2 | 3-3 |
| Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Tier 2 | Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||
| X | X | X | Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | X | X | |
| X | X | X | Tier 2 | X | X | X | ||||
| Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||
| Tier 2 | X | X | X | Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | ||
| Tier 2 | X | X | X | Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | ||
| Tier 2 | Tier 3 | Tier 2 | X | X | X | X | ||||
| Tier 2 | Tier 3 | X | X | X | X | |||||
| Tier 2 | Tier 3 | X | X | X | X | |||||
| Tier2 | X | X | X | Tier 2 | X | Tier 2 | X | X | X | X |
| Tier 2 | X | Tier 2 | X | X | Tier 2 | X | X | X | ||
| Tier 2 | Tier 3 | Tier 2 | X | X | X | |||||
| Tier 2 | X | Tier 2 | X | X | Tier 2 | X | ||||
| Tier 2 | X | Tier 2 | X | |||||||
| Tier2 | X | X | X | Tier 3 | X | Tier 2 | Tier 3 | |||
| Tier 2 | Tier 3 | X | Tier 2 | Tier 3 | ||||||
| Tier2 | X | X | Tier 2 | Tier 3 | ||||||
| Tier 2 | Tier 3 | |||||||||
| Tier 2 | Tier 3 | |||||||||
| Tier 2 | Tier 3 | |||||||||
| Tier 2 | Tier 3 | |||||||||
By mid to late First Grade, 10 children who made poor progress were shifted to Tier 3 intervention (description follows), but we continued small group, Tier 2 intervention in 20-30 minute sessions three times per week for nine 2nd graders. Three of these students continued Tier 2 as 3rd graders. Some children in small groups spent roughly half of the time on word patterns, decoding, and spelling, followed by reading aloud in text containing those patterns. Other groups of children had skills near grade level, but very slow reading rates. These children spent most of their small group time reading and rereading text to build fluency and comprehension.
Our Tier 2 instruction shared similarities with Vaughn's Tier model by being based on ongoing measurement of children's progress, conducted in small groups of 3 or 4, delivered in addition to general class instruction, and led by research personnel. It differed in two ways. First, instruction in Tier 2 targeted specific areas of weakness observed through our measurement system, rather than offering a complete reading lesson. Because of this feature, the content of Tier 2 differed for various small groups of children. Second, the duration of Tier 2 varied from 8 weeks to several years, depending on the students' progress. We measured the core skills monthly and as children's progress improved, dropped them from Tier 2 assistance or folded them back into an appropriate Tier 2 group.
Tier 3: Daily Small Group or Individual Instruction
Of the children who continued to receive Tier 2 past kindergarten, over half were in the average range on reading measures by the end of second grade and needed no assistance to stay in the average band through third grade. Tier 3 in this study consisted of individual or group of 2 instruction 5 days per week conducted by a member of the research team. Tier 3 began in January of First Grade for 8 children, and all but 3 of the children who became eligible for special services as LD were in Tier 3 at that time. Two more students later identified as LD were placed in Tier 3 at the end of First Grade, but so were 4 others, who became average readers by third grade. Some children in our study made poor progress in whole class and supplemental skill instruction, but caught up well when instruction was more intense (daily, focused, and often 1:1). Nearly 40% of children who received Tier 3 progressed sufficiently to maintain average performance throughout third grade without additional interventions.
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