DETERMINING RESPONSIVENESS TO TIER 2 INTERVENTION IN RESPONSE TO INTERVENTION: Level of Performance, Growth, or Both

This response to intervention study examined agreement between classification methods of preschool children’s responsiveness to Tier 2 intervention using level of performance (25th percentile), growth (equivalent to small and medium effect sizes), and both level of performance and growth in a dual-discrepancy approach. Overall, 181 children identified as making inadequate progress within high-quality Tier 1 instruction in 1 or more early literacy domains (language, print knowledge, phonological awareness) were randomly assigned to either an intervention group or a business-as-usual control group. All children were classified as responsive or not, and although greater proportions of children were classified as responsive after intervention compared with the control groups, agreement between methods of classifying responsiveness varied across the 3 early literacy domains and the single measures within each domain. These results indicated that depending on which of these methods was used, different children were classified as responsive.