Research from the Cutting Edge: The Work of the Florida Center for Reading Research

The presenter of this session was Stephanie Al Otaiba.

Stephanie says that we are moving as a country and a state to a response to intervention and that our field is moving to where we need to be. As educators we must move away from the wait to fail approach.

The main objective was to describe current research being conducted through FCRRTheir response to intervention model is a three tier approach.


Tier 1 Universal Interventions (80-90%)
*All students
*Preventive, proactive
*Evidence-based reading instruction- I heard this over and over by all researchers and presenters at this conference. They are growing tired of counties adopting curriculum that is not evidence- based and that is taught implicitly. Teachers must use a core reading program that covers all 5 areas of reading. She likes Open Court and the newest edition of McMillan McGraw Hill and says they are more explicit.
*Universal Screening


Tier 2 Secondary Intervention (5-10%)

*some students (at-risk)
*high efficiency
*rapid response
*small group interventions
*more frequent monitoring
*some individualizing


Tier 3 Teritory Interventions (1-5%)
*individual students
*assessment-based
*high intensity
*more frequent monitoring
The overall best choices for intensive reading instruction for dyslexic and struggling readers that I heard from presenters, teachers and parents were Wilson and Lindamood-Bell. What was really stressed is that at this level of intensive instruction a multi-sensory approach must be used (The Orton Gillingham Approach). I had a parent get chills and teary eyed while explaining to me how the Wilson reading program changed her son's life.

How fortunate are we at Chets to have both of these programs available for our primary students?! I am on a mission to get trained in Wilson this summer so that our intermediate students can benefit from this program.

Response to Intervention (RTI) is much like what we already have in place at Chets Creek within our classrooms and our primary and intermediate Target Teams.

The first step in the RTI process is
*intial universal screening
*class-wide curriculum based assessment (e.g. DIBELS) informs instruction
-teacher, coach, and principal look at initial performance of whole class (per benchmarks)
Judging how students respond to Tier 1
*second classwide screening to monitor progress
-teacher, coach, and principal look at how well the whole class responds to instruction (Is there a reading gap? or are about 80-90% of children meeting grade level benchmarks?)
*identify students who are not making adequate progress despite your strongest efforts and plan for immediate and intensive intervention and provide more frequent progress monitoring (Tier 2)

Much more information was shared with data on treatment schools. All handouts from the conference are suppose to be made available at http://www.idafla.org/. I keep checking and haven't found them yet.

websites suggested by FCRR
http://www.fcrr.org/
What works Clearinghouse (scientific evidence of what works in education)
http://w-w-c.org/index.html
The National Institute for Literacy (a federal organization)
http://novel.nifl.gov/