Why Some Students Are NOT Responding to Intervention
Hi friends,
For the last few weeks, we have been talking about the alarming fact that 66% of 4th-grade students are not reading at grade level, according to the U.S. Department of Education in 2019.
Last week, we met “Student A.” He is a 4th-grade student who was identified in Kindergarten for an IEP and continues to struggle, even after 4+ years of intervention. You can read more about him, here.
Today, we are going to talk about “Student B.”
Before jumping in - we want to reiterate something we said last week. As we work through these student case studies, this isn’t a case of pointing fingers. As we’ve mentioned before, we KNOW that if we as special educators, interventionists, and SLPs had access to the tools and resources we needed to quickly and effectively assess our students, create goals, and then lesson plan around these goals - we would be doing it!!!
These case studies are us trying to bring awareness to a systemic issue we’re facing as educators that needs to be addressed to change the trajectory of our struggling readers!
So let’s get to it.
Student B is also a 4th-grade student with average cognition who was identified for special education for speech in Kindergarten.
She is receiving tier 3 support such as:
20 minutes per day of direct literacy instruction
Mental health supports to address anxiety.
She is in the general education classroom for 87% of her day.
When looking at this student’s iReady Data, she…
Tested out of Phonological Awareness (once again, this is often based on students’ ages and not actual abilities as it is expected that after a certain age, students have these skills solidified).
Received a Scale Score of 326 for High-Frequency words, placing her at the Kindergarten Level.
Received a Scale Score of 349 for Phonics, placing her at a Kindergarten Level.
Received a Scale Score of 407 for Vocabulary, placing her at a Kindergarten Level.
Received a score of 418, placing her at a Kindergarten level for Literature Comprehension, and a 422 placing her at a first-grade level for Informative Text Comprehension.
In addition to her iReady data, let’s also take a look at her Standardized Assessment data
Like Student A, this student is scoring at or below the first percentile for the majority of her reading and writing skills. Her receptive vocabulary and oral comprehension are average (the teal bars are around the center of the graph), but many of her other scores aren’t even high enough to register on the graph (which is why many lines look like they haven’t been filled out.) These scores make it abundantly clear that even in 4th grade, at 9 years and 11 months old, she is still reading and writing at least 3 grade levels below where the standards say she should be.
When looking at her IEP, she has the following goals:
Phonics goal: Decode multisyllable words
High-frequency “sight word” goal: Read 20 high-frequency sight words
Phonics goal: Read short-vowel words using word patterns, word families, and common letter patterns.
Morphology Goal: The spelling of a base word can change when adding suffixes (hop, hopping; hope, hoping).
Her reading comprehension rubric appears as follows:
Be able to read a text with good accuracy and fluency
Be able to read a text with an increased reading rate and flow
In looking at the scores and goals above, we have to ask ourselves the following questions:
Why aren’t we addressing the full scope of her deficits?
When we look at her IEP goals, it tells us that her instruction targets decoding, morphology, and sight words. However, when we look at her scores, they tell us that she is struggling with phonological awareness, decoding, fluency, comprehension, writing, and expressive vocabulary. Why then, are we not targeting all of these struggles when we know that for students to be fluent readers and writers they must be able to tie together all 5-Core Components of Literacy?
How are these goals measured?
The next thing we have to ask is: how are these goals measured? When it says that she will decode 20 multisyllable words, are these VC/CV words? Do they include vowel teams? How many trials will this be tested over? Is it expected that she read 20 out of 100 words correctly? Is the expectation that she read 20 out of 20 words correctly? Without this information, there is no way to tell what she is actually being asked to do.
What metric is used to understand the significance of these targets?
Are we hoping that she will be reading words at a first-grade level? Are we hoping that she will reach grade level? The way these goals are written does not provide us with any metrics to help us understand what her goals actually are.
Why does the way goals are written make that much of an impact?
When we look at both Student A's & Student B’s data and goals, we see that the goals are difficult to measure, often vague, and the instruction is not always targeted to meet the student’s specific needs. If you read through the IEP goals and asked yourself “What does that mean?” or “How would they measure that?” you are not alone.
Vague, difficult-to-measure goals and intervention that duct-tapes resources from different programs are not allowing these students to close the gap.
Instead, we should…
Address the student’s needs through the lens of the 5 Core Components of Literacy
Try to make our lives easier by providing clear, easy-to-measure targets & benchmarks
Be clear on our end goal and the key skills or abilities we need to get there
Now, let us be clear here. We ARE NOT saying that these students’ teachers are doing a bad job.
What we are saying is that there are current holes and gaps in the support, resources, and training that the teachers are being provided in order to support these students.
These students, like so many others, have continued to fall behind year after year. Often, they take on the label “non-responders” but this doesn’t have to be the case. Check back next week to learn how systematic, cohesive, explicit instruction has helped this student and has her FINALLY closing the gap.
For more information on data tracking, join us in our How to Create SOR-Aligned Goals & Track Data. In this free workshop, you will learn how to use the data you already have to set appropriate goals, uncover the key to setting up your lessons to make data tracking easy and learn how to manage & organize your data. Plus, you’ll get a free data-tracking template!