General Education Response to Intervention (RTI): Examining RTI's Implementation and Effectiveness in Children's Disability, Cognitive, and Socio-Emotional Outcomes Using National Longitudinal Data

• In Event: Transforming and Shifting Systems to Ameliorate Inequity

Abstract

We provide population-level descriptive analyses for Response to Intervention (RTI) implementation and examine the associations between RTI and children’s disability status, and cognitive and socioemotional development from kindergarten through fourth grade using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort, 2011. We find that RTI schools were either not using an RTI model to identify children or not fully implementing RTI across all subjects. However, about 77% of RTI schools implemented RTI for more than two years and over 90% of schools informed parents of the program. Child fixed effects results indicate that children who attended RTI schools are three percentage points less likely to be identified with a disability compared with children attending schools that did not introduce RTI.

Authors

• Zhiling M. Shea, The Ohio State University

• Jade M. Jenkins, University of California - Irvine