What is RTI for mathematics?

Common Characteristics of Students with MLD

Although every learner is unique, students with a mathematics learning disability (MLD) tend to display any of a number of characteristics that affect their mathematics performance, including:

• Difficulty processing information
• Difficulty identifying relevant information in mathematics problems, especially in word problems
• Problem maintaining attention
• Difficulty selecting an effective problem-solving strategy
• Poor reasoning and problem-solving skills
• Memory and vocabulary difficulties
• Weak visual/spatial representational skills
• Learned helplessness—that is, having low motivation, being a passive learner, and attributing both successes and failures to external, uncontrollable factors (e.g., luck)
• Mathematics anxiety
• Deficits in the areas of mathematics facts and computational skills
• Difficulty translating information into a mathematical expression or equation
• Difficulty reading about mathematics
• Difficulty understanding the language, or vocabulary, of mathematics
• Difficulty understanding mathematics concepts and how concepts relate to procedures
• Difficulty solving multi-step problems
• Working through a problem without making sure all steps are completed or that the answer makes sense

Transcript: Differences between prereferral and RTI

Question: How does RTI differ from previous approaches to providing interventions?

Tessie Rose Bailey: So when the terminology of RTI came out in the new reauthorization of IDEA, I think what a lot of schools, districts may have done is just taken what they were originally doing for what we would consider pre-referral or a process of providing interventions prior to students going into special ed and renamed it RTI. And when you really look at what RTI is, it’s more of a preventative framework as opposed to a pre-referral, and that really is the big difference. In a pre-referral strategy, what we see is we wait till a student fails in some way, is recognized as failing, is referred to a team, folks try to come up with an intervention that will, in a sense, remediate that deficit before we make a referral to special ed. And in RTI, we’re really looking at a preventative framework, and we use what we refer to as screening tools to predict who may be at risk for failure, as opposed to waiting until a kid fails before they are referred. And in a preventative model, those students who are screened and who might be at risk for poor learning outcomes then receive interventions to prevent them from having struggles in the future, and those students who then don’t respond to highly qualified or highly effective interventions may be referred to special ed.

I often get questions about, well, is RTI really just an intervention framework? And when we talk about RTI at the RTI Center, we’re looking at it as a school-wide prevention framework. So core instruction is really part of that prevention, and all students should have access to that. And those students who are struggling or who may be at risk of struggling are identified through those screening tools that are reliable and valid. In an effective preventative RTI framework, what you would end up seeing is that students who are struggling may start moving through the tiers in an upward fashion, but the majority of those students, if their intervention at secondary and tertiary are effective, would then move to less-intensive tiers. And this is very different from a pre-referral model in which students tend to take a one-way street up. So they are no longer performing at a rate that we would expect them, so then we intervene and then they may be referred. But very few of those in a pre-referral model actually move back down to less-intensive tiers, and that to me is what really separate RTI as a prevention framework versus our past traditional pre-referral model.

One of the things that often makes it clear if people are using a pre-referral versus a prevention framework is that they’ll use things like, “Oh, I RTIed this kid,” or “That’s an RTI student.” But if you think about RTI as a prevention framework in which core is part of that prevention framework then in a sense all students are RTI kids. And if you are just looking at RTI as an intervention only, then it may really be that you’re addressing deficits as opposed to intervening early to prevent those poor learning outcomes. And if you think about special ed, a lot of people mistake RTI as preventing special ed, and in reality special ed is part of this larger prevention model, and so those students who were…I mean, really, the purpose of school is to prepare students for post-secondary outcomes. In kindergarten, we’re preparing them for elementary, in elementary for middle school, and we want to adequately prepare them not only for state tests but this bigger success in school.

And so part of what special ed’s role is is to prevent those students from experiencing struggles that they may have had, had they not had special ed. So I think really that the idea that RTI is not really just another name for a pre-referral model and instead is this larger school-wide prevention model is really the key to making sure that students, all students, are successful.

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Transcript: Tiers

In an average class of 25 students, approximately six will struggle with mathematics. Of those six, about five will need additional or more intensive instruction to remediate their skills. Approximately two of those five students will require even more intensive, individualized mathematics instruction. Implementing RTI is one way to provide additional instructional support to students struggling with math and to identify students who may have learning disabilities.