RTI & Identification of Learning Disabilities (Part II)

By Karen J. Rooney
Director, Educational Enterprises, Inc.
Richmond, Va.

There has been a great string of comments in response to my November 3rd post about RTI and the identification of learning disabilities. I thought I would bring some of my own insights to the forefront for all to read. I welcome additional comments on the specific topics of comprehensive Tier 3 assessments and identifying math disabilities.

I see a consensus around the idea of a comprehensive evaluation for Tier 3, which includes the data from RTI as part of the process. Some schools feel the need for more objective data to support their decisions at that level for identification, but most educators I talk with recognize the need for additional information to support planning for interventions at Tier 3. The assumption is that the child has already had appropriate instruction as well as more intense interventions, often using specialized programs, so the data needs to have more breadth and depth than typical RTI testing provides. At the Tier 3, the comprehensive assessment must provide additional information to guide intervention planning in the last tier of the RTI model in place.

Much of the confusion and controversy, in my opinion, is related to the field’s difficulty in moving from the construct of discrepancy as being distinct from the use of a discrepancy formula, which research has not supported. The idea of discrepancy is core to the construct of learning disability, but a comprehensive assessment may not look like the traditional psycho-educational battery that has been used in the past.

If we redefine a comprehensive assessment to mean gathering the data we need to make an informed decision about reasons for the child’s lack of progress, we may move forward more easily. The use of a fairly rigid, discrepancy formula–based assessment to determine eligibility has been problematic, so RTI can help provide the data to monitor progress. But also plan the comprehensive assessment to obtain the data needed to identify or rule out the presence of a learning disability and plan individualized interventions.

And on the subject of interventions for math:

Math is not my expertise, but I think resources such as Math Flash, Accelerated Math, Apangea, Saxon Math, Rocket Math, STAR Math, and AIMSweb Math Fact Probes are quite good and should be used to provide data about math performance.

For identification of a math disability, I also think that some more standardized assessment of math skills using norm samples are helpful. In addition, it would seem to me that you would need to do some cognitive testing to identify patterns that would be associated with math disability and scores assessing language processing to see if the achievement scores are stronger than the math scores.

You would then have cognitive predictors, math achievement scores, and non-math achievement scores that would be used for identification and intervention planning.

Comments

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There is a member that has a learning disability but I do not know much about such things. I am trying to learn what I can so I could be more educated. Thanks for posting this.