Response to Intervention (RTI) refers to a process that monitors how well students respond to changes in instruction. This process is a new way of providing assistance to students before they fail. The goal is to quickly identify those in need of help, provide interventions that have been shown to be effective with other students, and then monitoring their progress to determine if the interventions are working. If an intervention is not working, then a different intervention needs to be used and monitored for effectiveness.
Response to Intervention is a process of providing research-based interventions early in a student’s program based on measures of academic performance and then using those same measures to assess progress over time to make educational decisions. Struggling students receive additional and increasingly more intense interventions before they have fallen significantly behind. The term “intervention” refers to the specific strategies, techniques, and/or programs used, in addition to the regular classroom instruction, to improve the student’s performance.
Thus, the primary purpose of a Response to Intervention program is to provide an appropriate intervention before any consideration of a disability. In addition, there is a requirement to use scientific, research-based interventions, which simply means we need credible evidence to indicate that the intervention has been effective. Data is gathered frequently to determine if an intervention is working for each student in the RTI process. If an intervention is shown to be ineffective, a new intervention is initiated.
