Who Implements Response to Intervention (RTI) in Math, and Does RTI Benefit Math Achievement? A Multilevel Quasi-Experimental Study (Poster 4)

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

"Despite there being several studies of school-wide reading response-to-intervention (RTI) on reading achievement (Balu et al., 2015; Grapin et al., 2019; Shapiro, 2016), research on math RTI’s impact substantially lags behind, including how it differentially affects multilingual students (Kieffer et al., 2018). The current study seeks to understand the school characteristics that predict implementation of school-wide math RTI and math RTI’s impact on achievement.

We use the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study: 2010-11 Kindergarten Cohort to examine school-wide math RTI implementation and its impact on student math performance. We address the following research questions:
1. What school-level factors most meaningfully predict school-level math RTI implementation (theory-guided and exploratory)?
2. A. Does the exposure of students to math RTI between Grades 1 to 5 positively impact their math achievement?
B. Does the effect of RTI on math achievement differ for multilingual students, students showing initially lower performance, and multilingual students showing relatively lower math performance?

Preliminary results for research question 1, in which we use logistic regression with elastic net regularization, indicate that overcrowding issues, having time for reading/language arts and math instruction, using behavioral and writing RTI, and staff support for data use are among the predictors of schools’ use of math RTI. This study provides the first results of predictors of math RTI implementation using elastic net for variable selection. Results for research question 2 are in preparation; preliminary results will be presented in April 2024. We expect these results to be impactful for policy, researchers, and practitioners. "

Authors

• Garret Hall, Florida State University

• Qian Zhang, Florida State University

• Qi Wang, Florida State University