You are listening to an audio presentation from Vanderbilt University's 
Peabody College. This file is an excerpt of a lecture given by Doug and Lynn 
Fuchs, titled "Responsiveness-to-Intervention: A framework for the prevention 
and indentification of learning disabilities," on March 21st, 2007, on the 
Vanderbilt Peabody campus. The lecture was part of Vanderbilt's Learning 
Sciences Institute Colloquium series. The total running time for the excerpt 
is 5 minutes, 1 second.

[begin excerpt]

The learning disability definition, depends upon... the way that learning 
disabilities has been operationalized, typically, has been by means of 
something called an I.Q. achievement discrepancy. Okay?  So the idea was, is 
that children with learning disabilities are unique among low-achieving 
children because they are low-achieving despite their relatively high 
cognitive function. So, they represent the kind of paradox that's not observed 
among children with mental retardation. But a lot of critics have said, one -- 
I.Q., traditional I.Q. tests do not necessarily test intelligence; two -- for 
I.Q. achievement discrepancy to be legitimately viewed as a valid index, I.Q. 
and achievement should be relatively lowly-correlated, and in fact they are 
moderately-correlated; three -- when you look at poor readers -- young, poor 
readers, with and without this I.Q. achievement discrepancy; that is, 
children... poor readers with the discrepancy, and poor readers without the 
I.Q. achievement discrepancy, their performance on cognitive tests presumed to 
be closely related to reading are more similar than different. So, there's a 
strong empirical argument that goes against this so-called "two group 
hypothesis" -- I.Q. achievement-discrepant, versus not-discrepant. And four, 
using I.Q. achievement discrepancy as your operational definition tends to 
produce identification way late -- way too late, in childrens' elementary 
school careers. So, if you look at data from the U.S. Department of Education, 
the modal age at which a student is identified as learning disabled, is eleven 
and twelve years of age. So... and the reason for that is, in order to get the 
discrepancy, they have to fail with consistency over a long enough period of 
time to drop sufficiently below their age-appropriate peers.

[edit]

The way that I described responsiveness to intervention to you earlier is the 
way that virtually everybody is thinking about responsivness to interventions, 
and what we find kind of interesting about this is that it's... even though 
RTI is really something that people have started playing with only in the past 
five, 6-7 years, at most... it's developing into a kind of orthodoxy, you 
know. So, "RTI means this; it doesn't mean that." And we take a different view 
of that. In fact, the law, if you read carefully, encourages imagination and 
experimentation in terms of operational -- conceptualizing what what RTI might 
be; could be. 

And so, we're in the process of seeing whether and how we can define 
responsiveness to intervention, in terms of dynamic assessment. How many of 
you have heard of dynamic assessment? [pause] Okay, about half. So... why?  
Well, within this orthodox version of responsiveness to intervention, non-
responders to general education are at risk, and a standard tutoring protocol 
is the diagnostic trial. And as I said before, if a child is responsive, we 
assume that the tutoring or the prevention has been accomplished, the child 
has been remediated, [and] goes back to the regular classroom. If not, we 
assume that the student requires more intensive instruction. The problem, or 
problems include that we get a fair number of false-positives that go from the 
regular classroom to Tier II -- in fact, we have data that I can't really  
talk a whole lot about, from our previous research as part of this center -- 
that shows as many as 50% of first-grade children who go into Tier II do not 
belong in Tier II. It's not going to hurt them, but it is going to hurt the 
system, because it takes a lot of money to tutor these kids. And it may hurt 
some other kids who might not get into it, because you've got half... you've 
got way too many kids in there that don't belong there.

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Thanks for listening to this excerpt from Vanderbilt University's Peabody
College. For further information on this topic, please see the Learning 
Sciences Institute web site at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/lsi .