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The psychological and educational literature is replete with lists of the shortcomings of traditional educational assessment and intervention practices and concomitant calls for reform (e.g., Reschly, 1988, Sheridan and Gutkin, 2000; Ysseldyke and Christenson, 1987), and yet change has been slow . Much of current practice may still be characterized by said shortcomings, such as: predominately within-child conceptualizations of educational dif- ficulties; too little time allotted for prevention and early intervention; more rhetoric than action in creating significant opportunities for parent engagement; assessment conducted for the purpose of eligibility determination, rather than intervention; and the reliance on placement as a means of addressing students’ difficulties. An emerging alternative, response to intervention (RTI), addresses many of these limitations. However, to meet the spirit of those calls for reform, an RTI approach requires consideration of the complex interaction among environmental influences in multiple contexts, those in which children learn and develop. Conceptualized in this way, RTI is an opportunity to fully realize the assessment to intervention link.

This chapter presents information on assessment strategies for social behaviors in schools that may be used in a problem-solving approach that incorporates response to intervention (RTI). As a point of communication, although many associate RTI solely as a method for identifying and qualifying students for special education services, this chapter discusses RTI within the context of a problem-solving approach. The “interventions“ in RTI can be thought of as general education curriculum and instruction, interventions for students at risk of academic or behavior problems, or interventions that are intense enough to warrant special education funding. Thus, this chapter does not focus solely on RTI as an eligibility tool. The importance of the assessment of social behaviors in a problem-solving or RTI approach will be presented along with a detailed description of specific measures and example applications. The use of RTI with social behaviors will also be critiqued, along with suggestions for future directions for the field.

Fifty years ago, the United States’ educational system began a transformation to accommodate the large increase in background diversity resulting from the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. Large-scale studies, like the Moynihan (1965) and Coleman (1966) reports, were conducted to better assess and evaluate the health of this transformation both inside and outside school systems, and programs such as Head Start and Upward Bound were created to increase the probability of success for people of color. Efforts were noble, but results were found to be less than ideal because poor students, ethnic minorities, and/or non-native speakers of English were found to be more likely to be placed in special education programs than their white peers (Dunn, 1968). This trend of disproportionate representation of minorities in special education has continued for the next 40 years (Chinn and Hughes, 1987; Heller, Holtzman, and Messick, 1982; Hosp and Reschly, 2004; MacMillan and Reschly, 1998; Skiba, Poloni-Staudinger, Simmons, Feggins-Assiz, and Chung, 2006).

For well over four decades the dominant approach to identifying specific learning disabilities has been what has come to be called the psychometric/ exclusionary approach (Gresham, 2002; Vellutino et al., 1996). This approach typically entails assessment of achievement, intelligence, and cognitive abilities believed to underlie acquisition of a given academic skill, along with assessment of exclusionary criteria, such as uncorrected sensory deficits, emotional disorder, general learning problems, socioeconomic disadvantage, and like factors. The psychometric/exclusionary approach can be traced back to Kirk and Bateman (1962–1963), who initially defined learning disabilities as a collection of neurodevelopmental disorders having a deleterious effect on academic learning in children who do not have serious intellectual limitations, and whose learning difficulties are not caused by extraneous factors such as those just mentioned.

The purpose of this chapter is to describe reading interventions that might be used within a responseto- intervention (RTI) framework when students do not show adequate progress in learning to read from their current instruction. We will provide information about the nature of these interventions, the settings in which they have been studied, and the strength of their impact on early reading growth. There is a critical need for effective early interventions in reading, since current data (NAEP, 2005) indicate that 36% of students in the United States cannot meet basic standards of reading competence by the end of fourth grade. The situation is even more troublesome for poor and minority students, in that the latest national assessment indicates that 56% of poor, 61% of African American, and 57% of Hispanic students currently fail to meet basic reading standards in fourth grade. The need for strengthening early reading instruction is underlined when we consider that the incidence of students identified as learning disabled during elementary school has grown exponentially since the establishment of the category in 1977 (over 200%), and mostLDstudents are identified because of difficulties in learning to read.

The purpose of this chapter is to describe a critical component of the response-to-intervention (RTI) process: monitoring student response to general education instruction. First, we discuss the importance of the role of general educators in monitoring students’ response to intervention. Second, we provide the conceptual framework for an RTI model within which general educators play a critical role in identifying students at risk and monitoring their progress during classroom-based instruction. Third, we describe specific approaches for each of the steps included in this model.We then illustrate this process using a case example from research. We end with a summary of recommendations for general educators, and emphasize the need for further research if RTI is to be adopted as part of the special education identification process.

Vellutino et al. (1996) reported on first-grade students who had varying responses to a tutoring intervention in reading: many responded well (readily remediated poor readers) and some responded poorly (difficult to remediate). Vellutino et al. reported on differentiated findings for these subgroups of students providing guidance for examining students’ response to intervention in future intervention studies. Subsequently, Torgesen et al. (2001) conducted an intensive intervention with students with reading disabilities who were markedly behind their peers in reading and making no progress in closing the gap between their performance and their classmates. Providing them with 2 h daily of intensive reading intervention, students made significant gains on standard scores inword attack,word identi- fication, and comprehension (normalizing their performance in these areas), illustrating the benefits of intensive interventions for students with signifi- cant reading disabilities. These two landmark studies helped shape how future researchers considered interventions and their effectiveness demonstrating that students who were difficult to remediate might require more sustained and intensive interventions and/or better differentiated interventions than those who were more readily remediated.

Although the assessment of response to intervention (RTI) as a service delivery model has undergone considerable development over the last decade, all of the critical elements that must be in place for RTI to be successful have not received similar attention. One of the fundamental elements of RTI is the implementation of interventions. However, implementation of interventions appears to be commonly assumed within discussions of RTI rather than considered a major issue to be resolved. Emerging research suggests that assuring treatment or intervention implementation is, in fact, a substantial requirement for problem-solving services to students in schools (Noell, in press). This chapter describes some of the critical conceptual issues related to intervention implementation, and provides a selected review of the research regarding the assessment and assurance of intervention implementation.

For many educators, “response to intervention” (RTI) is a new term, part of the nomenclature only after the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEIA, 2004). For other educators, RTI represents the latest evolution of alternative educational service delivery that began in the 1980s (Deno, 1985; Graden, Zins, and Curtis, 1988; Shinn, 1989, 1995). RTI involves the provision of high-quality instruction and interventions matched to student need, with frequent monitoring of student progress (i.e., responsiveness to the intervention) for data-based decision-making (Batsche et al., 2005). In general, two forms of RTI are described in the professional literature: (a) RTI-problem solving and (b) RTI-standard treatment protocol .

The importance of intervening early and effectively to help more students achieve learning success cannot be overstated, because early learning success lays the foundation for a child’s learning future. Children who come to be successful at reading, writing, mathematical thinking and learning in general tend to be more successful throughout their entire school career (Alexander and Entwisle, 1988; Snow, Burns, and Griffin, 1998; Torgesen, 1998; Tuscano, 1999; Vellutino, Scanlon, and Tanzman, 1998). Moreover, early learning success is related to the absence of adolescent and teenage risky behaviors, including violence, dropping out of school, early sexual behavior, pregnancy, substance abuse and delinquency (Barnett, 1996; Beuhring, Blum, and Rinehart, 2000; Currie and Duncan, 1995; Juel, 1996; Pfannenstiel, 1989). Conversely, poor performance in the early years almost invariable continues (Torgesen, 1998; Snow et al., 1998; Stevenson and Newman, 1986). The social costs of frustrated, unsuccessful learners who become adults in the information age is hard to overestimate.