Teachers Are Still The Test: Limitations of Response To Instruction Strategies For Identifying Children With Learning Disabilities

1
Teachers Are Still The TestLimitations of
Response To Instruction Strategies For
Identifying Children With Learning Disabilities
Michael M. Gerber University of California, Santa
Barbara
Responsiveness-to-Intervention Symposium December
4-5, 2003 Kansas City, Missouri The National
Research Center on Learning Disabilities, a
collaborative project of staff at Vanderbilt
University and the University of Kansas,
sponsored this two-day symposium focusing on
responsiveness-to-intervention (RTI) issues. The
symposium was made possible by the support of the
U.S. Department of Education Office of Special
Education Programs. Renee Bradley, Project
Officer. Opinions expressed herein are those of
the authors and do not necessarily represent the
position of the U.S. Department of
Education. When citing materials presented
during the symposium, please use the following
Gerber, M. M. (2003, December). Teachers are
still the test Limitations of response to
instruction strategies for identifying children
with learning disabilities. Paper presented at
the National Research Center on Learning
Disabilities Responsiveness-to-Intervention
Symposium, Kansas City, MO.
2
RTI Could We? Should We?
Special education is implicitly concerned
with questions of efficiency, for the only
solution to the problems of normalization is to
speed up the rate at which handicapped children
learn (p. 25). Gerber Kauffman, Journal of
Special Education Technology, 1979
From a policy perspective, what school sites
appear to need is a way of acquiring or shifting
resources and teaching technology in response to
students whom teachers perceive as difficult to
teach without the burden of labeling such
students handicapped (p. 221). Gerber,
Exceptional Children, 1984
3
Teachers-as-Test(Gerber Semmel, Educational
Psychologist, 1984)

• current policy assumes that teachers referrals
  represent suspicions, not conclusions, about
  referred students exceptionality (p. 139).
• agreement between teachers and objective
  instruments may not be an acceptable test of
  concurrent or predictive validity of
  teachers-as-test (p. 143).
• referral behavior may indeed reflect an
  underlying lawfulness in how teachers form
  judgments about teachability, how these judgments
  are translated into referralsand how teacher
  identification can appear at once so
  idiosyncratic but at the same time reliable (p.
  145).

4
Theory of Instructional ToleranceGerber,
Exceptional Children, 1988

• Teachers embody the most critical instructional
  resources
• Students vary in their responsiveness to
  instruction
• Achievement varies with teachability
• Teachers cannot be greater resources or use
  their knowledge/skills more efficiently unless
  greater investment is made in them

5
Theory of Instructional ToleranceGerber,
Exceptional Children, 1988

• children come to be viewed by teachers as
  extremely difficult to teach or manage as a
  result of environmental transactions in specific
  instructional contexts.
• The validity of such a tolerance is socially and
  historically constructed, not psychometrically
  derived.
• judgments about the validity of referral and
  assessment practices reflect judgments about
  the elasticity as well as about the legitmacy of
  the instructional tolerance.

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Students Vary in Responsiveness to Instruction
Student A Achievement
Student B Achievement
Teaching Effort
Teaching Effort
No or only small gains without instructional
effort
Some to substantial gains without instructional
effort
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Students Vary in Responsiveness to Instruction
Slow rate of achievement with increasing effort
Rapid rate of achievement with increasing effort
Student A Achievement
Student B Achievement
Teaching Effort
Teaching Effort
8
Achievement varies because responsiveness varies
Maximum effort for B
Achievement for Student B
Maximum effort for A
Effects of instructional effort when teaching
students in groups vary because of differential
response to each particular teachers instruction
Achievement for Student A
9
It is important to realize that these outcomes
represent optimal outcomes for a given teacher
Achievement for Student B
Most teachers perform far below an optimal effort
most of the time
P
Achievement for Student A
10

• Even with optimal effort, the distribution of
  outcomes is influenced by
• Policy,
• Conscious Choice,, or
• Simple Accumulation of
• Contingent Responses

Achievement for Student B
P
Bp
Achievement for Student A
11
Teachers can avoid the choice, but not the
trade-off as long as students differ in
instructionally significant ways and teaching
resources and technology --are limited
Achievement for Student B
P2
P
Loss for A
Gain for B
Achievement for Student A
12
Teachers can avoid the choice, but not the
trade-off as long as students differ in
instructionally significant ways and teaching
resources and technology --are limited
Achievement for Student B
P2
P
P1
Gain for A
Loss for B
Achievement for Student A
13
In actual classrooms, teachers identify and
instruct a number of students who are tolerably
similar in their response to instruction
Achievement for Modal Students
P
Achievement for Highest Risk Student(s)
14
How can schools change things?
Solution Requires new resources (e.g.,
professional development, new technologies)
Achievement for Modal Students
P2
P!
P
Teachers want to be here!
P1
Gains for A, no loss for B
Achievement for Highest Risk Student(s)
15
RTI and Classroom Tolerance
RTI implies new professional development, new
in-class assessment procedures, and new primary,
secondary, and perhaps tertiary
interventions The net effect is to increase
classroom tolerance.
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Requirements for Response-to-Instruction at
National Scale

1. Baseline professional development for classroom
   teachers
2. Selection of suitable assessment targets
3. Identification of 15 30 who fail to meet
   learning criteria
4. Supplemental (strategic) intervention (e.g., 30
   min x 2 x 10 weeks)
5. Identification of 2 - 6 requiring further
   intervention
6. Supplemental (intensive) intervention (e.g., 30
   min x 10 x 10 weeks)

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Assumptions for Estimating Cost of RTI for K-3
First Year at Scale

• Average teacher salary 45,930
• Est. hourly pay 32/hr
• Est. hours of baseline professional
• development 40 hrs
• Number of K-3 students 30,001,243
• Est. Tier II students (18) 5,400,224
• Est. Tier III students (4) 1,200,050
• Est. hrs intervention II/III, 10 wks 50/10
• Estimated K-3 teachers 255,709

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Assumptions for Estimating Cost of RTI for K-3
First Year at Scale

• (Overhead)
• Estimating with 15 instructional grouping
• Estimating costs of professional development
  using teacher pay rate
• Estimating reasonable costs for administration,
  monitoring, evaluation, and materials

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K-3 RTI at National Scale
20
2003 Federal Appropriations for NCLB (Title II,
Part A) 1,780,825,000
Estimated Costs for RTI for K-3, First Year, at
National Scale 2,033,228,291
21
Source Torgesen, J. K. (2002). Lessons learned
from intervention research in reading A way to
go before we rest. Learning and Teaching Reading.
British Psychological Society.
22
But Who is Learning Disabled?
RTI either redefines learning disability, or
simply instantiates a more systematic and
universal method for allocating scarce resources
to reach certain achievement goals for as many
students as possible. However, recent data from
fMRI studies suggests discrete, identifiable, and
general brain activation differences.
23
Children with dyslexia showed a correlation
between the magnitude of increased activation in
left temporo-parietal cortex and improvement in
oral language ability (Temple et al., 2003, p.
2860).
Treatment was associated with improved reading
scores and increased brain activation during both
tasks, such that quantity and pattern of
activation for children with dyslexia after
treatment closely resembled that of controls
(Aylward et al., 2003, p 212).
24
Further research is needed to determine how
students identified via RTI compare
neurologically with those identified by other
means, including teachers-as-tests.
E. Paulesu, J.-F. Demonet, F. Fazio, E. McCrory,
V. Chanoine, N. Brunswick, S. F. Cappa, G.
Cossu, M. Habib, C. D. Frith, U. Frith (2001).
Dyslexia Cultural Diversity andBiological
Unity. Science, 291, 2165-67. Elise Temple,
Gayle K. Deutsch, Russell A. Poldrack, Steven L.
Miller, Paula Tallal, Michael M. Merzenich, and
John D. E. Gabrieli (2003). Neural deficits in
children with dyslexia ameliorated by behavioral
remediation Evidence from functional MRI, PNAS,
100, 28602865. E.H. Aylward, T.L. Richards,
V.W. Berninger, W.E. Nagy, K.M. Field, A.C.
Grimme A.L. Richards, Thomson, S.C. Cramer
(2003).Instructional treatment associated with
changes in brain activation in children with
dyslexia. Neurology, 61, 212219
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Old/New Recommendations(Gerber Semmel, 1984)

• Assessment functions and expenditures should be
  removed from the district level to the school
  site.
• School site staff should organize problem-solving
  teams whose purpose is to assist teachers with
  direct interventions in response to
  teacher-identified instructional problems.
• School site administrators, in conjunction with
  their site problem-solving teams, should
  determine which students will require resources
  over and above what would normally be provided to
  the site that is, special education.
• Requests for assistance from either teachers or
  school sites do not necessarily connote
  substandard performance or capability, but should
  be viewed as a very direct form of needs
  assessment.