Interventions

Interventions are targeted instruction based on student needs. They are designed to be coordinated with and enhance the comprehensive curriculum that is provided in general education. Within the problem-solving model, there is an assumption that approximately eighty percent of students' educational needs are met in the general education classroom through a curriculum that is not only comprehensive, but differentiated to meet the students' needs. Thus the general education curriculum and instruction provides the foundation.

When individual students' needs are not met by the foundational curriculum and instruction, interventions are provided to enhance and supplement what the students are being provided in general education. The students' specific needs are identified through on-going classroom assessment. Targeted goals are identified and short term intervention plans are designed to supplement classroom instruction. In the area of literacy, these types of plans have been described in the PLP guidance. Interventions, however, are implemented in multiple areas, not only literacy (Behavior: Crone, & Horner, 2003, Gresham, 2004; Math: Fuchs, L. etal, 2005; VanDerHeyden & Burns, 2005). Interventions plans include frequent progress monitoring such that the intervention can be evaluated and modified as needed.

Both individually-designed interventions and standard protocol interventions have been applied to support student learning Christ, Burns & Ysseldyke, 2005; Grimes and Kurns, 2003). Standard protocol interventions match a set of research-based practice to students who show predictable patterns of performance. Such practices have been found to have a high probability of improving student performance (Fuchs & Fuchs, 2005; Kamps & Greenwood, 2005; Torgesen, Alexander, Wagner, Rashotte, Voeller, & Conway, 2001; Velluntino, Scanlon, & Tanzman, 1998). For example, all students whose reading fluency doesn't meet a particular benchmark will participate in specific instruction program that includes scientifically-based practices to develop reading fluency. This contrasts to individually-designed intervention where instructional strategies and goals are determined by teams who participate in a problem-solving process to determine the student's need (Kovaleski, Gickling, Morrow, & Swank, 1999; Marston, Muyskens, Lau & Canter, 2003; Upah and Tilly, 2002).

In summary, interventions are:

• Enhancements of the general education curriculum
• based on student's performance on a variety of assessment measures
• targeted to a particular skill or set of skills to improve student outcomes
• short-term, explicit instruction
• monitored frequently to document progress
• revised as necessary based on student performance

Such interventions must be a part of a school-wide model of instruction and service delivery, often referred to as tiered model (Coyne, Kame'enui, & Simons, 2001), that incorporates a variety of support structures and services to help classroom teachers meet the needs of all students.

Examples of Interventions

3rd grade Math

In one school a third grade teacher was concerned that several of her students did not have the basic addition and subtraction skills needed to solve the types of problems presented in the Everyday Math units. In October, she identified four students who had difficulty quickly solving addition and subtraction problems on both unit math tests and weekly math probes. Her goal for the students was to increase the number of addition and subtraction problems they were able to complete correctly in a minute.

In consultation with the other third grade teachers, a four week intervention was designed. The four students would work with the teacher three times a week for fifteen minutes completing addition and subtraction fact games. Progress-monitoring data on students' rate and accuracy was collected using math fact probes at the end of each session. At four weeks, the teacher evaluated the data and determined that two students met the goal and exited them from the intervention. The other two students' interventions were modified to address weaknesses specific to subtraction. The teacher provide additional instruction to help the students understand the algorithms for subtraction used a think-aloud strategy and color-coded activity sheets. On the modified plan, one student improved while the other student continued to have difficulty completing addition and subtraction problems quickly and accurately. At this time, further analysis of this student's math performance is on-going with an expanded problem-solving team considering his needs.

1st Grade Literacy

Mrs. Jones, a grade one teacher, began to analyze her Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS) data to write Personal Literacy Plans for her students that were not performing on grade level in literacy. She found that about twenty percent of her class did not meet the grade-level standards for literacy, and had particular difficulty with phonemic awareness. She brought her concern to the other two first grade teachers and they decided to supplement their first grade literacy curriculum for all twelve students who did not meet the standard in phonemic awareness.

These students first intervention, a standard-protocol intervention, was the Road to the Code program.

The students came together with one of the classroom teachers four times a week for twenty minutes and participated in the program. The targeted skills were initial and final phoneme segmentation and blending of two and three phoneme words. Their progress was monitored with weekly probes.

At five weeks the students' progress monitoring probes were evaluated. Two students met the target and were able to successfully segment and blend phonemes and were exited from the intervention. Six students were on track to meet the target at the end of ten weeks and four students demonstrated limited progress. The intervention for these four students was modified to be more intense (smaller group size, added more review and practice). At the end of ten weeks, eight students met the target and only two students did not demonstrate progress in the targeted segmentation and blending skills. These two students were brought to the problem-solving team to consider evaluation for special education.

5th grade Organization

A fifth grade teacher in another school was concerned that a student was not able to have his materials (notebook, folder, book, pencil) ready at the start of each academic period. Because of this organizational issue, he was often late in starting tasks or sometimes distracted those around him while trying to find the needed materials in his desk. She documented this problem by keeping a record of how many times he was prepared to start a task at the beginning of each academic subject with needed materials throughout a day. She collected this same data on various students on subsequent days. She then compared the student in need to the peers and found that his organizational skills were very discrepant from his peers. Specifically, she found him to be prepared for roughly two out of seven academic activities per day. The times that he was not ready, she needed to assist him in finding his needed materials (folder, book, notebook, pencil) that were located inside his desk. It should be noted that all of the various materials were previously color coded for each subject.

In consultation with the resource teacher, the teacher designed a file system for the boy. Instead of keeping his materials in his desk, he would keep them in a file box located near his desk. At the start of each period, he would be required to find the needed items in the file and have them ready on his desk. The goal was that after 2 weeks, he would be prepared for each subject every period which was the expectation in this classroom. During the two week period, she would observe every other day and record with tally marks each time he was prepared.

The teacher showed the boy how the file was organized and helped him find the materials the first day that the plan was implemented. By the second day, she periodically reminded him and gave him give him visual cues to help him remember what materials he needed. By the third day, she checked in with him occasionally and made sure he was using the file system appropriately and gave him lots of praise for doing so.

At the end of two weeks, she determined that the intervention had worked because the boy was ready with appropriate materials each subject. She made the decision to keep the file system in place since it was working.

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