One thing that can be very overwhelming in RtI is all the terms used. If your child becomes involved in Tier 2 or Tier 3, you may begin to hear a lot of new vocabulary you haven't heard before. This page is designed to help parents and teachers understand what it all means. Below is a list of vocabulary that we use more often now along with what it means.
Phonemic Awareness: The ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. Can involve work with rhymes, words, and syllables.
Phonics: The understanding that there is a predictable relationship between phonemes (the sounds of spoken language) and graphemes (the letters and spellings that represent those sounds in written language.)
Sight Words: A bank of words that are stored in our memory and are instantly recognized.
Fluency: Being able to decode words automatically, group them meaningfully, read with expression, and understand what is read.
Comprehension: Understanding what one reads.
Math Facts: A bank of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts stored in our memory that can be recalled instantly.
Differentiated Instruction: Tailoring the curriculum, teaching environments, and practices to create appropriately different learning experiences for students in order to meet each student's needs. To differentiate instruction is to recognize students' varying interests, readiness levels, and levels of responsiveness to the standard core curriculum and to plan responsively to address these individual differences.
Grade Level Standards/Benchmarks: Expectations set up by the state/nation of what students are expected to know by the end of each grade level.
Universal Screeners: The process in which data from multiple measures are analyzed to determine whether each student is likely to meet, exceed, or not meet benchmarks. Designed to be quick, easy, and repeatable. (Screeners used in our district: PALS, DRA, Easy CBM, SRI, MAPS, MBSP, AIMSweb.)
Research/Evidence Based Instruction: Educational programs, lessons, or interventions, shown to be effective in reasearch studies.
Intervention: Instructional programs, practices, and lessons intended to increase student performance in the general curriculum for students who are not meeting benchmarks in a particular curricular area.
Progress Monitoring: A tool used to quantify a student's rate of improvement and evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention to address the student's needs. Progress monitoring tools are designed to be easy, quick, repeatable, and highly sensitive to change in student performance.
Fidelity of Instruction: This means that instruction is consistently delivered in the manner in which it was designed. Five common aspects of fidelity of instructon include: adherence, exposure, program differentiation, student responsiveness, and quality of delivery.