Reading Struggles: Using Tiers to Promote Success
By: Mia Daucourt
With approximately 1 in 11 people identified as learning disabled, concerns have risen
about how to tackle childhood learning difficulties, especially in reading. The first step in
helping children with reading problems is to identify which children need extra help. As it
currently stands, there is a tracking and intervention framework embedded in U.S. classrooms
called “response to intervention,” or “RTI,” which uses three possible definitions to flag children
for extra help in reading. This extra help comes in the form of targeted small group intervention
for children who do not respond to traditional full-class instruction in one or more key literacy
areas. Problematically, there are three competing definitions for qualifying children for
intervention. Specifically, intervention is provided for either children who fail to get better across
a school year, children who fail to reach grade-level proficiency of the 25 th percentile or higher at
the end of the school year, or children who fail to reach both of these benchmarks. In order to
resolve this inconsistency, a recent study by Milburn and colleagues (2017) explored three key
literacy areas, namely oral language (like vocabulary skills), print knowledge (like knowing
letter names), and phonological awareness (knowing how written letters and words sound), in
order to figure out which of these definitions was best for flagging children who need extra
reading help.
Looking more deeply at Milburn and colleagues’ (2017) study, their sample included 277
children who attended North Florida Title 1 prekindergarten programs with high-quality Tier 1
preschool curricula. The children were in regular classroom instruction, or Tier 1, for 3 months,
and those who qualified were then in Tier 2, small group instruction, for 11 weeks. Tier 2
involved weekly intervention doses that ranged from 60 to 180 minutes of explicit instruction in
the literacy area(s) in which a child struggled. A child who needed help in one reading domain,
received 60 minutes of additional small group instruction, while a child who qualified for help in
two or three domains received either 120 or 180 minutes of targeted small group intervention,
respectively.
After being a part of both Tier 1 and Tier 2 instruction, all children, including those who
only received Tier 1, were classified as either responsive or nonresponsive to intervention, using
the three competing definitions used to flag children for extra help. To reiterate, extra help is
provided for either children who fail to get better across a school year, children who fail to reach
grade-level proficiency at the end of the school year, or children who fail to reach both of these
benchmarks in one or more literacy domains. In addition, these three definitions were compared
based on the how many children they classified as responsive to intervention and how
consistently they flagged children that needed Tier two intervention.
There were a number of important findings from these definitional comparisons. Overall,
Milburn and colleagues (2017) found that students who participated in Tier 2 intervention were
better off (aka, more responsive) than children who did not receive anything beyond Tier 1
instruction on both individual and average literacy domain scores. Basically, Tier 2 instruction
works to improve children’s literacy performance in vocabulary, phonological awareness, and
print knowledge. When comparing how many children were classified as responsive to
intervention across all three literacy domains, the reading disability definition that required
children to improve across the school year identified the most children as responsive, the
definition that required children to reach grade-level proficiency (the 25 th percentile or higher)
identified the next highest proportion of children as responsive, and the criterion requiring both
benchmarks identified the fewest children as responsive. Overall, the different definitions had
low agreement on the children they identified for Tier 2 intervention. However, the criterion that
included both end-of-the-year grade-level performance above the 25 th percentile and getting
better across the school year may be the best way to flag kids for intervention because it showed
the highest level of agreement.
Overall, the RTI approach is important because it gauges how kids are doing and adapts
the instruction they receive based on children’s specific needs. Although there is no exact
definition for reading disability that emerged as best for classifying kids to get Tier 2
intervention, Milburn and colleagues (2017) did show that the definitions differ in the proportion
of children they identify. If a school wants to make sure they cast the net wide, capturing as
many children with reading deficits as possible, they are best off using a definition based on how
children improve over the school year to flag children for Tier 2 intervention. However, a school
that may have less resources to dedicate to helping struggling kids may be better off using the
more stringent criteria that requires both improvement over the school year and end-of-the-year
grade level performance to qualify for Tier 2 instruction. These are important findings for
adapting intervention techniques to the resources a school has available and to children’s specific
reading needs.
Want to know more about RTI?
RTI involves three tiers of instruction that increase in intensity based on how children respond
to intervention. The first tier of RTI is regular full-class instruction that uses a scientifically-
validated curriculum and ongoing testing to monitor children’s reading progress. Based on how
they score on progress-monitoring literacy skill tests, children either remain in Tier 1
instruction with no additional help or are flagged for more intensive intervention. Accordingly,
the Tier 2 of RTI is a supplement to regular full-class instruction and involves additional small
group intervention that specifically targets the literacy area(s) in which children are flagged as
struggling. Only those children who do not respond to Tier 2 intervention are moved forward
into Tier 3, which involves intensive one-on-one intervention after the previous tiers fail to
help a child reach proficiency in one or more literacy areas.
Milburn, T. F., Lonigan, C. J., & Phillips, B. M. (2017).
Determining responsiveness to tier 2
intervention in response to intervention: Level of performance, growth, or both.The
Elementary School Journal,118(2), 310-334.
