Case Study on 2nd grader Shaunika

## Scenario

Shaunika is seven years old and a second-grader at Pegram Elementary School. At her school, "the first round of Tier 2 instruction has ended for four second-grade students who were not responding adequately to the reading instruction in the general education classroom. The second-grade school support team is ready to meet to evaluate the progress of these students and to determine each student's instructional needs. They begin by evaluating Shaunika's Tier 2 progress monitoring data. The team will use the dual discrepancy approach to determine how Shaunika has responded to Tier 2 instruction and to decide what tier of instruction would best meet her current instructional needs. The criteria the team are using to determine whether a student is responding adequately to instruction is a performance level of 45 wpm and a rate of growth of 1.8" (Brown, 2009).

## Strategies to applying RTI

### Screening and Identifying

The dual-discrepancy model applies when, first, the student is significantly below same-grade peers on measures of academic performance and secondly that the student performs poorly in response to carefully planned and precisely delivered instruction (Kovaleski & Prasse, 2004).

Tier 2 should provide intensive, systematic instruction on up to three foundational reading skills in small groups to students who score below the benchmark score on universal screening. Typically, these groups meet between three and five times a week, for 20 to 40 minutes. Monitoring the progress of Tier 2 students should be done at least once a month. This data will be used to determine whether students still require intervention. For those students still making insufficient progress, school-wide teams should design a Tier 3 intervention plan. The screening and identifying for Shaunika should consider fluent word recognition and oral reading fluency, which students at this age need to have an understanding and mastery of. Assuming Shaunika is still struggling with these. School staff can then proceed to creating and implementing a Tier 3 plan for her improvement.

### Plan for Interventions

Because Shaunika has not reached the benchmarks, the RTI team should be begin Tier 3 intervention. This should include communicating current data to parents and presenting the option of screening for Special Education services. Because resources and personnel are limited, inclusion in SPED would give Shaunika regular access to the school's Reading Specialist who could identify the specific areas that are causing difficulty for her such as phonemic awareness and decoding. Whether or not Shaunika enters the SPED program, she will need **daily intensified reading instruction in both one-on-one and small group settings.** Because we don't want to overwhelm her with the amount of additional reading time she requires, her general ed teacher should consider how to work in the extra minutes in small segments as part of study in other subject areas. These best practices should be considered by the RTI team while planning how to help Shaunika:

1. Concentrated instruction focusing on a small, targeted set of skills;
2. A slower, more deliberate lesson pace;
3. Additional reading sessions on a daily basis. The average is an additional 75 minutes of instruction per week but varies from 45 to 120 minutes depending on the student and school;
4. Opportunities for extensive practice and high quality feedback with one-on-one instruction;
5. Ensure the student has mastered a particular skill or strategy before moving on (Best Practice for RTI).

### Example Activities for different subject areas

#### Activities in Reading / Language Arts

While Shaunika more than likely needs additional interventions, the regular classroom teacher can assist Shaunika and other students in the general classroom by utilizing speed reading games like SuperSpeed from Whole Brain Teaching. The game pairs students of different reading strengths and gives them a task of reading as many sight words as possible in one minute. This is a quick activity that can be done daily, and pairs can change and rotate. Giving Shaunika more controlled exposure to regularly seen sight words should help increase her confidence.

#### Activities in Math

Given that Shaunika has been identified for intervention with reading, it is important to create activities to aid in her development in the math classroom as well. Though math is a system of numbers, math education also relies on students to have strong reading skills; they have to understand problems in context and identify the mathematical operations being asked from a set of given words or circumstances. 2nd Graders tend to focus on place value, addition, subtraction, and telling time. Many textbooks and math curriculums use word problems starting in the younger grades. Shaunika should be given direct instruction with a teacher when working with word problems. She should be taught and should practice several word problem reading skills including:

* previewing the text to connect background knowledge
* highlighting or selecting key terms
* rephrasing the wording to check for understanding

Shaunika could also be given graphic organizers that help her remember specific vocabulary related to mathematical concepts. She could use organizers like the "frayer model" to help her create a mental schema of what a given math word means. For example, she could use this organizer for "addition" or "sum". This allows her to draw, write, and describe exactly what the term addition means and this will help her be more successful in future word problems.

#### Activities in Social Studies

Shaking can be helped to break down bigger topics in Social Studies by using an ABC Brainstorm organiser like this one in which she can record the words used in the topic, see hem carefully separated and write something about each one. It is specifically designed to help students with literacy and particularly reading issues.

#### Activities in Science

Glossaries, electronic dictionaries, thesauruses, translation sites, videos, and other online references give students opportunities to practice using language in authentic ways. These types of resources are the first level of support for building scientific language and vocabulary. They provide students with a way to access more information about a specific term and to be more independent in their reading of content area texts.
Teachers can boost student background knowledge, which may be lacking for some struggling students. Interactive websites, encyclopedias, and other free and commercial websites give students opportunities to engage with science content in engaging and varied ways. Multimedia tools can also allow for repeated viewings of a video, animation, or slide show, allowing students to return to the content multiple times and build mastery. Discourse scaffolds can provide students with a second level of support in building scientific knowledge and vocabulary. Rather than focusing on individual terms or phrases, students are examining explanations, paragraphs, and longer documents. For example, students can use concept-mapping software to help them visualize the structure of science discourse. Writing templates can be used or created by the teacher to illustrate the general structures that students are expected to use for their writing (such as a lab report). Writing prompts for scientific arguments can help students get started with writing while illustrating the correct format. These approaches may help support students who have weak literacy skills, or who are unfamiliar with formal and scientific uses of language.

### Data-Based Decision Making

Collected data on Shaunika's progress during Tier 2 will be used to determine if Shaunika should stay in Tier 2 or if she would be better served in a higher or lower tier.

In addiiton, Shaunika's behavior should be taken into consideration a it may provide clues about her reading progress. This checklist will be used to monitor Shaunika's behavior, it is for a second grader. It is used to monitor student's behavior every day and a new sheet should be used each week. Tally marks are use on this chart and every time a child exhibits, one of these behaviors' the teacher would use one tally to stand for one time the child exhibited the behavior. If the child exhibited this behavior 5 times on Monday, then there should be 5 tally marks in the box next to the behavior under Monday. This behavior chart can be tweaked based on the behaviors you have noticed the child exhibits and monitor based on those behaviors.

## Contributors

Kimberly Cochrane added Scenario, the outline format of this page, content under Activities in Reading / Language Arts, and a linking paragraph under Data-Based Decision Making to connect content to the three Tier system of RTI.

Thomas Morrill added content to Screening and Identifying.

Shanda Bonn added to Plan for Interventions.

Adrian Moore added a short paragraph explaining the dual discrepancy model and a Social Sciences activity.

Sean Calabrese added a paragraph/media to the Activities in Math.

Brittany Payne added 3 paragraphs to Activities in Science.

Shinese Anderson contributed paragraph under Data-Based Decision Making

## Sources

"Best Practice for RTI: Small Group Instruction for Students Making Minimal Progress (Tier 3)." nd. What Works Clearinghouse. Retrieved from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/best-practice-rti-small-group-instruction-students-making-minimal-progress-tier-3

Biffle, Chris. "SuperSpeed: The Game of Champion Readers!" *WholeBrainTeaching.* Retrieved on October 15, 2015, from http://www.wholebrainteaching.com/index.php?option=com\_k2&view=item&layout=item&id=136&Itemid=104

Brown, J., Show, K., & the Iris Center. (2009). *RTI: Data-based decision making.* Retrieved on October 14, 2015, from https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B\_4BhgdIQcnXbm1xVl9ubnlyY00/view

Institute of Educational Science. (2009). *Assisting Students Struggling with Reading: Response to Intervention (RtI) and Multi-Tier Intervention in the Primary Grades*. IES PRACTICE GUIDE. [PDF] Retrieved on October 17, 2015, from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/practice\_guides/rti\_reading\_pg\_021809.pdf

Kovaleski, J. and Prasse, D., (2004), Response to Instruction in the Identification of Learning Disabilities: A Guide for School Teams, National Association of School Psychiatrists. Retrieved on October 18, 2015 from http://www.nasponline.org/resources/principals/nasp\_rti.pdf

National Center for Technology Innovation. *Using Technology to Support Struggling Students: Science Literacy, Vocabulary, and Discourse. http://www.readingrockets.org/article/using-technology-support-struggling-students-science-literacy-vocabulary-and-discourse*

Reading Rockets. (2015) "Best Practice for RTI: Monitor Progress of Tier 2 Students." Retrieved on October 17, 2015, from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/best-practice-rti-monitor-progress-tier-2-student