Initial Development of a Procedural Guide for Implementing Response to Intervention with Gifted Elementary School Students

• Other Authors: Robertson, Stephanie Glenn (authoraut)
• Format: Others
• Language: English; English
• Published: Florida State University
• Subjects: Educational psychology
• Online Access: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_etd-5145

In recent years, a focus on individual student needs has set the stage for tailoring educational interventions to address issues of students who are not working up to educational proficiency standards outlined in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. Luckily, this change also opens the door to meeting the needs of students who are not working to their potential in the classroom. A report commissioned for the U.S. Department of Education (1993) reports that gifted students have already mastered 33-50% of material to be studied in a school year before the year even starts. Unfortunately, these same students spend the majority of their school days in regular education classrooms without modifications or accommodations to the curriculum. In addition, research indicates that gifted students allowed to work on additional material instead of maintaining the pace of the rest of the class actually performed better on end-of-the-year testing in math and science than gifted controls that did not pursue additional work (U.S. Department of Education, 1993). Further, the gifted students who engaged in independent study performed no differently in other subject areas. The implication is that one method of improving student math and science performance is to allow for accelerated and/or enriched curricula. RtI establishes differentiated curriculum as the standard, rather than the exception, and could be used as a method to address the issue of American student underperformance in a scientific and systematic manner by focusing on early engagement leading to increased student motivation. Recommendations for use of RtI with the gifted are beginning to emerge in the literature (Hughes and Rollins, 2009; TAG, 2009; Brown and Abernathy, 2009), though no specific procedural guidelines have been published that guide the adaptation of the RtI model to meet the needs of gifted students. This paper applies the problem-solving method central to RtI to the gap between American student performance and world economic demands. It goes on to offer a potential remedy to the problem: a specific procedural guide for implementation of the RtI model with gifted students that was presented to both practitioners in the schools and experts in both RtI and Gifted Curriculum and Instruction for initial validation and qualitative feedback. === A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Systems in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. === Summer Semester, 2012. === December 5, 2011. === Development, Gifted, Guide, Procedure, RtI === Includes bibliographical references. === Steven Pfeiffer, Professor Directing Dissertation; Angela Canto, Committee Member; Frances Prevatt, Committee Member.