Third Grade and Beyond
To introduce an important issue associated with use of the RTI model at third grade and later, I will first present some data from Florida's Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) that is given to all children in Florida from third to tenth grade. The FCAT is an excellent test of reading comprehension that places increasingly heavy demands on word knowledge, conceptual understanding, and inference making skills at each successive grade level from three through ten. It is also the primary test used to assess the reading growth of Florida's school children. The test is criterion referenced against an established standard of performance at each grade level, and scores are reported in five achievement levels. Level 3 indicates grade level performance, and level 1 is considered to be seriously below grade level. Third grade students who achieve at level 1 cannot be promoted to fourth grade until their performance improves. Figure 1 shows the percentage of children who scored at level 1 and level 2 in the reading portion of the FCAT in 2003.
The most important point from Figure 1 is that the percentage of students achieving level 1 performance on the FCAT rises from 23% in grade 3 to 43% in grade 9. The percentage of students at level 1 drops in grade ten, but a significant number of children who took the test in grade 9 are no longer in school in grade 10 (the number of students taking the test dropped from 206,000 at grade 9 to 167,000 in grade 10). If we assume that the test increases appropriately in difficulty from grades 3 through 10, we are left with the conclusion that approximately 43% of students in Florida are making seriously inadequate progress in learning to read by grade 9. These students are not making adequate progress through the "reading to learn" phase toward adult levels of reading proficiency. Given the current state of reading instruction and early identification of reading failure in Florida (as in most states), it is likely that many in the group of 9th grades students who scored at level 1 on the FCAT continue to struggle with basic issues of word reading accuracy and fluency. However, many others may fail to achieve adequate levels of literacy on a test like the FCAT because of inadequate knowledge of word meanings, poorly developed conceptual knowledge, or difficulties with reasoning and inference making.
Thus, as we think about the application of a response to intervention model with older children, we face an issue that has important implications for the kinds of students that will be most likely to be identified as learning disabled. That is, if this model is effectively applied in the early grades, it will already have identified all the students who have the most common kind of reading disability that directly affects the ability to acquire accurate and fluent word reading skills (Torgesen, 1999). The kinds of children most likely to be identified as candidates for special education in the upper grades will be children who do not make adequate progress in the reading comprehension area.
The most important challenges to continued growth of reading ability after about third grade involve continued growth in reading fluency, growth in knowledge about word meanings (vocabulary), growth of inference and reasoning skills, and development of a range of reading strategies that can be employed to improve comprehension or repair it when it breaks down (National Reading Panel, 2000). If an RTI model were applied to growth in reading comprehension, or to growth in each of these four areas of component skills, a large number of children will be identified who have difficulties in areas that have traditionally been been assessed by measures of verbal intelligence.
As mentioned earlier, appropriate preventive interventions during the early stages of learning to read can prevent word level reading difficulties in a very high proportion of children. However, when these interventions have been applied to children, such as those from low SES or minority backgrounds, who enter school with large deficits in vocabulary development, their progress in reading declines sharply as their lower levels of vocabulary knowledge begin to affect reading comprehension after about third grade (Foorman, Seals, Anthony, Pollard-Duradola, 2003). This problem is illustrated in a recent study in which performance on a measure of oral reading fluency was used to predict FCAT reading comprehension performance in third grade (Buck & Torgesen, 2003). Among Caucasian children who achieved an adequate score on the fluency measure (110 WPM), only 9% achieved below grade level on the FCAT. The corresponding figure for African American students was 17%, and for Hispanic students, it was 13%. Although simple measures of oral reading fluency are a good overall measure of reading progress even beyond the early stages of reading growth, variables such as vocabulary knowledge and verbal reasoning skills play an increasingly important role in explaining individual differences in reading comprehension tests at each successive grade level. If measures of reading comprehension are used as part of the RTI model with older children, increasing numbers of students with problems in the verbal knowledge and reasoning domain will be identified as learning disabled. Of course, if measures of vocabulary knowledge were used as part of an RTI model with children in early elementary school to identify students at risk for reading comprehension difficulties in third grade and later, the same effect would occur.
To summarize the discussion thus far, the application of an RTI model for the identification of reading disabilities in children after early elementary school will identify large numbers of children failing to make adequate progress in reading comprehension. Since a large part of the variance on reading comprehension tests after third grade is explained by individual differences in the kind of verbal knowledge and skill that has traditionally been measured by verbal intelligence tests, the RTI model will identify many children whose reading difficulties are caused primarily by what is usually referred to as verbal intelligence. This would necessarily involve an expansion of the concept of learning disabilities to include any child with insufficient ability or knowledge to achieve a specified level of performance on measures of reading comprehension, even if that lack of ability falls in areas most directly assessed by measures of broad knowledge and ability such as IQ tests.
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