'What Works' Guide Gives RTI Thumbs Up on Reading

The federal Institute of Education Sciences has released a practice guide on reading instruction and “response to intervention,” lending its stamp of approval to a process that has already been widely adopted by schools and districts.

A strong response-to-intervention, or RTI, program for early-childhood reading should include screening of all pupils, small-group instruction three to five a times a week for children who are struggling, and monitoring of those struggling students at least once a month to see how they are responding to the intensive lessons, according to the guide. It was published on the ies Web site on Feb. 18 through the What Works Clearinghouse .

But Russell Gersten, the chairman of the panel that developed the guide, cautioned there is still much that educators don’t know about response to intervention, even as RTI, a method of identifying and providing intensive instruction to struggling students,...