DIAGNOSING DISABILITY THROUGH RESPONSE-TO-INTERVENTION: AN ANALYSIS OF READING RECOVERY AS A VALID PREDICTOR OF READING DISABILITIES

Abstract

There is growing evidence that the current method of identifying students with a reading disability is ineffective. The wait-to-fail model of assessing students after second/third grade and conceptual problems using intelligence tests for identification result in students not being provided the assistance they need during the early-elementary school years (Lyon, Fletcher, Shaywitz, Shaywitz, Torgensen, Wood, Schulte, & Olson, 2001). The educational community is pursuing this discussion in terms of response-to-intervention (RTI) methods of assessment. A student can be considered for identification by an assessment of: the amount of progress demonstrated over time during a remedial intervention program, and by attaining an established cut-off score of success.

Reading Recovery, a one-on-one intervention program, is a widely implemented remedial literacy program to assist struggling readers in first-grade classrooms. This program meets the criteria of response-to-intervention because of its daily assessments, which track students' progress and cut-off score of reaching book 15 by the end of the 20-week intervention. The program uses a series of story books (numbered 0-25) that increase in difficulty. By means of a discriminant function analysis, a retrospective study of second- through fifth-grade students who participated in Reading Recovery during first grade investigated assessment elements of the Reading Recovery Program (beginning text level, ending text level, and number of weeks in the Reading Recovery Program).

Results indicated that Reading Recovery assessment elements are significant predictors of first-grade students who later are identified as reading disabled. Using the school districts' current reading disability definition as an 18-point difference between intelligence and reading achievement test scores rendered significant results. Significant results were also found with refined reading disability definitions based solely on students' low reading achievement scores--emphasizing the students who struggle most with reading. In all the analyses, ending text level was the largest Reading Recovery assessment predictor of students later being identified as reading disabled or not.