PREVENTION AND INTERVENTION WITH STRUGGLING STUDENTS

Prevention and Intervention with Struggling Students

Chapter 1: Introduction

Background of the Study

The growing concerns with LD assessment in special education have been precipitated by federal policies and research in the field of special education. The policies with the biggest impact have been: (a) the No Child Left behind Act (NCLB) passed in 2001, and (b) the Individuals with Disabilities Improvement Act (IDEIA) passed in 2004. NCLB proposed sweeping changes in the entire national educational landscape by emphasizing among others, the use of evidence-based practices in order to help prevent unnecessary struggles, early intervention through the use of evidence-based practices to help eliminate or lessen the misrepresentation in special education, and demonstrated program effectiveness by schools in order to be funded under NCLB. Schools therefore became obligated to validate the use of their scientifically based interventions by monitoring student progress in order to show improvements in student achievement.

IDEIA 2004 states, “when determining whether a child has a specific learning disability ... a local educational agency shall not be required to take into consideration whether a child has a severe discrepancy between achievement and intellectual ability" ... a school "may use a process that determines if the child responds to scientific, research-based intervention as part of the evaluation procedures ..." (Section 1414(b) (6)) (Fuchs; et.al. 2008). The provisions of IDEIA 2004 made it possible for schools to use up to 15% of their special education funds for intervention in general education.

Some researchers in the field of special education have suggested the previous IQ-achievement discrepancy models often used for LD identification represent a wait-to-fail model and do not support early intervention (Fuchs & Fuchs, 2006). The tenets of the RTI approach encompass the goals of NCLB and IDEIA 2004 by providing intervention in a gradual, data-driven method for recognizing, characterizing, and clarifying the difficulties of struggling learners in order to develop more appropriate interventions for those students. Fuchs and Fuchs (2006) further argued that students that have been misdiagnosed as LD or those students that did not qualify when the IQ-achievement models were used will in all likelihood respond to RTI procedures lessening a need for future intervention through special education. Research has highlighted various means for new methods to help correctly identify students in need of special education services and those students in need of early intervention. Alternatives to the SDM recommended include the application of RTI (Jenkins Hudson & Johnson 2007) as well as curriculum-based assessment (CBA) and curriculum-based measurement (CBM), which often accompany RTI methods (Foegen Jiban & Deno 2007). Research indicates that RTI is just as effective if not more, as the discrepancy methods when identifying students with learning disabilities (http://aasep.org). Carney & Stiefel (2008) recommends assessment using RTI and a comprehensive assessment rather than a discrepancy method. Hale et al. suggests that neither RTI nor SDM works well on their own but together could not only identify psychological processing problems but better help design intervention to fit those ...