IMPORTANT TERMS:
Accommodations:
Changes in instruction that allow children to demonstrate their abilities in the classroom or assessment/testing setting. Accommodations provide equity, not advantage, for children with disabilities.
Benchmarking or Universal Screening:
Assessment process typically completed in fall, winter, and spring during each school year. Students are given quick, accurate predictors of reading or math success to determine which students are “at risk” for not meeting grade level standards.
Core Curriculum (Tier 1):
The curriculum, typically mandatory, for all students in a school.
Differentiated Instruction:
Refers to educators changing the curriculum, teaching environments, and practices to create appropriately different learning experiences for students in order to meet each students’ needs. To differentiate instruction is to recognize students’:
Educators plan responsively to address these individual differences through the use of differentiation.
Evidence-Based Practice:
Educational practices and instructional strategies that are supported by scientific research studies.
Formative Assessments:
An ongoing assessment used to inform instruction. The information gathered helps the teacher to make changes to instruction in an ongoing manner. An example would be a weekly lesson test.
Goal Line:
On a graph, a goal line shows the student’s initial performance and goal for the end of the year or intervention period.
IDEA:
IDEA stands for Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004. It is a federal statute related to providing a free, appropriate, public education and early intervening services to students with disabilities ages birth through 21.
Inclusion:
When students with disabilities are educated with general education age/grade-level peers.
Intervention:
A specific type of instruction that is used to help with a specific type of concern.
Modifications:
Alterations that change what is being taught or what is expected from the student.
Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS)--also known as RtI (Response to Intervention OR Response to Instruction):
MTSS emphasizes the principle that all students can learn when:
Norm:
Comparison of a student’s performance to that of an appropriate peer group. Some examples are school, township, state, or national comparisons.
Percentile:
A way of comparing a student’s score to those of children in a “norm group” who took the standardized test when it was being developed. For example, if a student scores at the 62nd percentile on a norm-referenced test, it can be said that she has scored at least as well as, or better than, 62 percent of students her age from the normative sample. Being at the 62nd percentile does not mean your student answered 62% of the questions correctly.
Problem Solving Approach within MTSS:
Approach used to problem solve for entire grade levels, classrooms, groups of students, and individual students. Four steps include:
Progress Monitoring:
Data collection practice that is used to frequently assess students’ performance to evaluate the effectiveness of instruction and intervention.
Specific Learning Disability:
The IDEA 2004 definition of Specific Learning Disability is: The child does not achieve adequately for the child’s age or meet State-approved grade-level standards, when provided with learning experiences and instruction appropriate for the child’s age or State-approved grade-level standards.
Summative Assessments:
Testing the knowledge that a student should have mastered by a particular point in time. An example would be an end of unit benchmark test.
Tiered Instruction:
Levels of instructional intensity within a multi-tiered prevention system. Tier 2 and Tier 3 are ideally delivered in addition to core instruction (Tier 1).
Adapted from: RTI Glossary of Terms (National Center on Response to Intervention, April 2009).