Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

Unlike traditional learning disabilities assessment that assesses students at one point in
time using ability, achievement, and processing measures, the RTI approach repeatedly
assesses the student’s progress using curriculum-based measurement (Fuchs & Fuchs,
1997, 1998). Special education is considered only if a child’s performance shows a dual
discrepancy in which performance is below the level of classroom peers and the
student’s learning rate (growth) is also substantially below that of classroom peers
(Gresham, 2002). The intervention itself also functions as the test (Fuchs & Fuchs,
2006), although reading tests can be part of the evaluation (Fuchs, Fuchs et al., 2002).
Assessment of reading-related cognitive abilities (including language-based abilities) has
no place in mainstream RTI theory and practice (Fuchs, Compton, Fuchs, Bryant &
Davis, 2008). However, in the face of strong research evidence (see Section 4.1.2), a
few researchers and practitioners working within the RTI framework have recently
begun to advocate use of screening batteries that include measures of phonological
skills, orthographic knowledge, letter knowledge, vocabulary and syntactic ability (e.g.
Davis, Lindo & Compton, 2007).
Vellutino, Scanlon and Jaccard (2003), in a follow-up to their earlier study (Vellutino et
al., 1996), confirmed their previous findings and showed that RTI can help determine
whether a child’s reading difficulties are caused primarily by basic, neurodevelopmental
deficits (e.g. dyslexia) or by experiential factors such as limitations in early reading
experience and/or early reading instruction. The children who have the lowest RTI are
most likely to be in the former category. Some evidence in support of the RTI
approach comes from a study by Speece and Case (2001), in which students
identified as non-responsive in an RTI model were found to be more deficient on
measures of phonological processing, academic competence, and social skills than
those students identified as learning disabled through the traditional discrepancy
model diagnostic approach. Note, however, that, unlike many advocates of RTI,
Vellutino, Scanlon and Jaccard (2003) do not assert that RTI should be the sole metric
on which identification of a neurodevelopmental learning difficulty should be made.
Rather, they conclude that the most confident basis for decisions on causality and
prognosis can be made using RTI together with assessment of reading-related cognitive
skills.
There remains the tricky issue of whether RTI is a legitimate basis for deciding whether
or not the child has a learning disability. Does the fact that a child responded adequately
to an intervention rule out the possibility that they have a disability? Does adequate RTI
inevitably mean that the child’s learning difficulties were caused exclusively by poor
instruction? Does the fact that the child did not respond adequately to an intervention
mean that he or she has a neurodevelopmental learning difficulty? Advocates of RTI
sometimes assert that if child’s learning difficulties have been remediated or normalized,
then the issue of whether or not that child had a learning disability in the first place is of
little consequence. However, by focusing almost exclusively on reading achievement
rather than the component skills involved in reading and associated difficulties, the RTI
approach appears to have confounded the category ‘reading difficulties’ with the
category ‘specific learning difficulties’ (SpLD). Although children with SpLD typically do
have poor reading achievement, they often have other problems as well (such as
problems with arithmetic), and even when their reading skills have been normalised,
many other problems are likely to remain (see Torgesen, 2005b). In the RTI approach, a
low-performing child who shows growth rates similar to that of peers in a lowperforming
classroom would not be considered a candidate for intervention because the
child is regarded as deriving similar educational benefits (although somewhat lower)
from that classroom. Torgesen, Foorman and Wagner (2007) also point out that RTI has
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