Response to Intervention (RTI) and Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA)

Response to intervention has been getting a lot of air time lately both in school psychology and special education circles. A explanation of RTI and how it relates to ABA I thought was in order.

Response to intervention is essentially a model of intervention and diagnosis. The current model for referring and diagnosing students with disabilities is to refer them for an evaluation, which can take months for the referral, another month for the eval, another month for the report, and may lead to a referral that will not work for the child (e.g. resource room). RTI aims to change this process.

Defined: “…RTI is an objective examination of the cause-effect relationship(s) between academic or behavioral intervention and the student’s response to the intervention”

Basically, to identify if a child is having difficulty learning, the way you identify the disability is by monitoring their progress and looking at how they respond to a particular intervention.

Core Elements:
- Intervention is organized into levels of intensity
- It is diagnostic…if a child doesn’t respond to an intervention, could be indicative of a disability
- Keeps teachers and schools accountable
- Ongoing data collection
- Pre-referral

Basically, you need to monitor a child's response to a program through data collection and use their response to give you information about how to proceed.

Three Tiered Interventions:
First Tier: What you do at the first sign that a kid is struggling…basic classroom modifications.
Need to answer the question:
- Are routine classroom instructional modifications sufficient to help the student achieve academic success?

Second Tier: Individualized interventions tailored to the struggling learner
- For students that have failed with Tier 1.
- Can the individualized intervention plan carried out in a gen-ed setting bring the student up to the academic level of his or her peers?

Third Tier: The most intensive academic supports available in the school
- Generally for students with chronic and severe academic delays or behavior problems
- Often only available through special education
- What ongoing supports does this student require and in what settings should they be provided to facilitate the greatest success possible?

As a teacher:
- Need to monitor struggling students
- Act quickly, and support them early on
- Collect data and monitor progress
- Have access to a pool of resources of evidence-based strategies
- Monitor and track what you have tried, how effective it was or wasn’t, and communicate this to your school-based support team.

RTI is essentially a system to begin intervening and monitoring progress immediately in a classroom. How is this different than what is done in ABA programs? Behavior analysts identify a need, or a struggle, and implement an intervention, monitor progress, and change the intervention as needed based on the data. RTI is bringing this to the regular education classroom: guidelines to use these methods to work with struggling learners in regular education settings.

It is great to see data-based decision making entering our schools and the mainstream. However, it was written into the law in 2004 and is still not universally accepted in most schools, but it is a start.

I would love to hear any experiences with the RTI model in schools.