Identifying Students at Risk for Academic Failure: The Application of a Prereferral Screening Model Including Responsiveness to Intervention

• Main Author: Gatti, Susan Lockhart
• Other Authors: Lisl Zach
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: LSU 2004
• Subjects: Psychology
• Online Access: http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04082004-124842/

Increasing demands are continually placed on our education system to improve the educational outcomes of all children. To provide the best services to our children, appropriate screening, assessments, and intervention services need to be implemented within the school setting. The current study evaluated the relationship of a screening procedure (Screening to Enhance Educational Performance, STEEP; Witt, 1996) using curriculum-based measurement (CBM) and compared the results of the screening procedure to other commonly used problem nomination procedures for second, third, and fourth graders. The data were obtained from archival sources that resulted from a service and training project conducted jointly by a university and its associated elementary level professional development school. The students who demonstrated the greatest need for remediation of their reading skills were provided an intensive reading intervention and the improvement in their reading skills relative to their peers was evaluated to determine each individuals response to the intervention, as was the overall effectiveness of the intervention for improving reading fluency for all students who participated in the intervention. Results generally indicated that STEEP was concordant with other problem identification methods such as teacher referrals and criterion-referenced tests. Furthermore, students response to intervention services was evaluated based on their performance when compared to peers and on the demonstrated efficacy of the intervention that was implemented. The data were also analyzed to determine the number of intervention sessions necessary to predict long-term outcomes based on students slope of their regression estimates. The study suggests that the process implemented by the school that included broad general screening, more detailed assessment of at-risk students, and early intervention for low performing students may be a viable approach for secondary prevention that is generally, but not precisely, concordant with other methods of defining educational problems. Models similar to the one implemented in this case may contribute to the professional evaluation of the determination of students need for special education services.