Conclusions
In conclusion, this brief paper has presented data and analyses in support of two points concerning the use of the RTI model to identify children with reading disabilities in late elementary school, middle school, and high school. First, since growth in word knowledge, conceptual understanding, and reasoning/inference making skills play a significant role in explaining individual differences in the growth of reading comprehension in older children, a significant proportion of children who fail to make adequate progress in reading comprehension after grade three are likely to have cognitive/linguistic deficits in these areas. Thus, a large proportion of children identified by the RTI model as failing to make adequate progress in reading growth after third grade are likely to be students with generally low verbal intelligence, rather than specific disabilities of the type traditionally associated with the category of learning disabilities. Second, for older children who are still struggling with basic reading skills after third grade, gains from appropriately focused interventions should be most rapid for phonemic decoding accuracy, next for word reading accuracy, then reading comprehension, and slowest for reading fluency.
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