Ed. Dept. Backs Research Plans for RTI Method

With funding from the Department of Education, researchers are closely examining “response to intervention,” an instructional framework that many educators say offers promise for treating children with learning difficulties before they fall behind their peers.

The Education Department’s office of special education programs, or OSEP, is financing a $1.5 million research partnership between the University of Kansas in Lawrence and the Illinois education department, which is investigating how response to intervention can improve academics and behavior in urban schools. Another OSEP project, based at the University of Texas at Austin, is refining response-to-intervention techniques used with beginning readers.

And the 2-year-old National Center for Special Education Research, a part of the federal department’s Institute of Education Sciences, is seeking grant proposals by mid-November for researchers who would like to delve into all parts of response to intervention, or RTI, from how it is used with individual students to how it can be...