Responsiveness to Intervention
This brief and oversimplified discussion of the growth of reading skills has implications for the measures that should be used within RTI models to identify children with reading disabilities. In kindergarten through second grade, measures most sensitive to individual growth in reading will likely focus on word level skills, such as phonemic decoding and oral reading accuracy and fluency. It makes sense to focus on word level skills through second grade because it is in these areas that skills are growing most rapidly, and individual differences in word reading ability are probably the most important factor in determining performance on reading comprehension measures at this age level (Foorman, Francis, Shaywitz, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1997). In kindergarten, before most children can read connected text, measures of pre-reading skills that have a causal relationship with later word reading growth, such as measures of phonemic awareness, and letter-sound knowledge, are the best candidates to use within RTI models (Torgesen & Wagner, 1998). In order to identify children who will later struggle with reading comprehension because of limited oral language ability, it also seems important to monitor the development of vocabulary in young children (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002).
If RTI models use growth in word level reading skills as the primary means of identifying children with reading disabilities in the early elementary grades, they are likely to identify a high proportion of the children who have traditionally been labeled learning disabled because of reading difficulties. Current definitions of dyslexia, for example, suggest that it is a ". . . specific language-based disorder of constitutional origin characterized by difficulties in single word decoding..." (Lyon, 1995). The immediate cause of these difficulties in single word decoding among children with dyslexia is weakness "...in the phonological component of their natural capacity for language"(Liberman, Shankweiler, and Liberman, 1989, p.1). Children can manifest varying degrees of weakness in phonological processing while performing at average, or above average levels on many other language and cognitive tasks (Share & Stanovich, 1995). Thus, reading difficulties that are characterized primarily by difficulties in the development of accurate and fluent word reading skills fit well within the traditional view of learning disabilities, which has required that children exhibit some cognitive/linguistic strengths in addition to weaknesses in their area of disability.
Application of the RTI model to the identification of learning disabilities in early elementary school will identify other children who also have phonological weaknesses, and thus experience difficulty in the "learning to read" phase, but who also have weaknesses in broader cognitive and language domains. These children may also perform poorly on measures of phonological skill, not because of "constitutional weaknesses", but rather because their pre-school language environment did not support the growth of phonological sensitivity (Lonigan, 2003). Many of these children would not have been identified using previous approaches to the identification of learning disabilities because they do not show a significant discrepancy between their word reading skills and other language/cognitive skills. However, they have the same phonologically based problems in learning to read words, and they need the same kind of instructional interventions, as children whose phonological disability is significantly lower than their other language/cognitive skills.
In an ideal world, if the RTI model were applied consistently and was followed up with sufficiently powerful interventions, the vast majority of children should arrive at the end of second grade with adequate word level reading skills. This is, in fact, the finding from numerous prevention studies that show all but a small proportion of children can be taught to read words accurately and fluently if given timely and appropriate interventions (Denton & Mathes, 2003; Torgesen, 2000).
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