What Evidence-Based Practices Shaped the Planning and Delivery of Secondary Intervention?
The Kansas Center is based on a prevention model to address student risks as early as kindergarten and first grade. Overall the approach combines: early screening for reading and behavior risk within a 3-tiered school-wide intervention model incorporating implementation of effective reading practices.
Screening for early reading risk. The program uses two categories of instruments for early screening: (a) emerging/beginning literacy: Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills - DIBELS (Good, 1998) and (b) behavioral problems: Systematic Screening for Behavior Disorders - SSBD (Walker & Severson, 1992) and the Early Screening Project (Walker, Severson, & Feil, 1995). However, for purposes of this report, our focus is on reading problems. The DIBELS (Good, Simmons, & Smith, 1998; Kaminski & Good, 1996) is designed to measure performance on early literacy skills before children begin to read. DIBELS serves two functions, (a) to identify children who are not acquiring pre-reading skills (i.e., letter naming, initial sounds fluency, blending sounds in nonsense words), and (b) to monitor progress due to reading interventions/curriculum. Good and colleagues have used the DIBELS instrument with over 30,000 children in primary grades and have used the data to propose "benchmarks" for student performance across skills to indicate a satisfactory level of progress. Once students are screened, teachers can then determine which students are in need of differential instruction to assist the students in "catching up" to a level of on track performance.
Three-tiered intervention model. In addition to psychometrically sound instruments for screening students for reading risks, schools need a model for decision making and intervention management. The model used by the Center and required by the funding agency, the Office of Special Education Programs, is a 3-tiered model of intervention. In a recent review of early literacy research Al Otaiba and Fuchs (2002) summarized this model designed to intensify instruction to meet the needs of students with increasing academic needs (McMaster, Fuchs, Fuchs, & Compton, in press; O'Connor, 2000; Coyne, Kame'enui, & Simmons, 2001). In primary intervention, the most effective instructional programs are implemented by general educators with the expectation that this will "accelerate the learning of most children" (p. 313), i.e., reducing the number of children with behavioral and learning problems. In secondary intervention (e.g., strategic small group instruction in deficit areas) is implemented for students unresponsive to the primary level instruction. In tertiary, intensive intervention is implemented; for example, pull out instruction with multiple practice opportunities, systematic feedback and progress monitoring.
For example, Kame'enui, Simmons, Good, and Chard (2002) describe a 3-tiered model (Project CIRCUITS) addressing prevention of reading problems. The authors defined prevention as an action to prevent or stop something from happening, and also to reduce the impact of a problem that is already identified. They described primary prevention (first circuit) as a systems level effort to effectively reform a school's efforts to prevent reading difficulties, which should meet the needs of 80% of the population. Secondary prevention (second circuit) introduced strategies and procedures to supplement and enhance the primary prevention and typically accommodates 15% of the K-3 students not benefiting from primary prevention. Tertiary prevention "represents reading instruction that is specifically designed and customized for students with marked difficulties in reading or reading disabilities, and who have not responded to primary and secondary prevention efforts" (p. 4). Tertiary intervention is reserved for approximately 5% of students. The success of any such 3-tiered model like this clearly depends on the use of sensitive early measurement strategies like DIBELS to provide short-term, sensitive data on rate of growth that can be used for making instructional intervention decisions relevant to the 3 tiers of instructional intensity. This 3-tiered model is compelling because typical general and special education services in elementary school settings often lack a cohesive process for ensuring early access to the most successful reading interventions for all children in K-3. In many cases, at risk students receive no early services for reading concerns until referred for special education evaluation that typically occur later than second grade.
Effective early reading instruction. Effective early reading instruction incorporates use of the following evidence-based skills, known to promote successful beginning literacy: (a) awareness of and ability to manipulate phonemes in segmenting and blending strategies (Ehri & Soffer, 1999; Foorman et al., 1998); (b) awareness and understanding of letter-sound correspondence (Abbott, Walton, & Greenwood, 2001; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989; Foorman et al., 1998); (c) the ability to translate the speech stream sound structures of oral language (phonological processing) into written language (Abbott, Walton, & Greenwood, 2001; Adams, 1990; Felton & Pepper, 1995); and (d) fluency in decoding words and understanding word meaning (Adams, 1990; Sawyer, 1992). Children also need many opportunities to apply these skills in reading situations (Chard & Kameenui, 2000; Ehri, 1991; Juel, 1991). Also critical is quality teaching (Abbott, Walton, Tapia, & Greenwood, 1999; Greenwood, Terry, Arreaga-Mayer, & Finney, 1992; Torgesen et al., 2001).
We know that students who require tertiary level intervention to make progress learning to read commonly exhibit phonological deficits and that when these highest risk students are provided early, intensive effective instructional interventions, up to 95% can reach average performance levels. The literature indicates that instructional designs for early intervention based on explicit instructional strategies, including cognitive, direct instruction, and behavioral strategies, using multiple exemplars and repeated practice lead to increasingly powerful student outcomes (Engelmann, 1997; Gersten, Carnine, & Woodward, 1987; O'Connor, Notari-Syverson, & Vadasy, 1996). Thus, the formulation of the experimental secondary-level intervention with the Kansas Center was guided by this evidence and included the use of (a) small instructional groups of 3-6 participating students and low student teacher ratio, combined with (b) explicit, phonemic and phonics-based instruction. Selected curricula were Reading Mastery, Proactive Reading, Programmed Reading, and Read Well, use of which varied by choice across experimental group schools in the Kansas Center. An additional context of intervention (and only minimally discussed in this paper) was use of positive behavioral support (PBS) in the 3-tiered model.
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