Response to Intervention (RtI) is a multi-tiered approach to provide evidence-based instruction to all students. Within a RtI paradigm, teachers and other professionals collaborate to design interventions for students who are at-risk for a learning disability. Despite the widespread use of RtI pardigms in educational settings, few studies have documented the efficacy of collaboration and teacher follow-through in intervention planning. This study examined support for children requiring Tier 2 interventions, which address at-risk students and are typically conducted in the regular classroom. Specifically, the purpose of this study was to determine whether reading comprehension interventions could be delivered in a systematic, collaborative procedure involving performance feedback meetings. A SLP collaborated with the teacher in grades 2, 3, 4, and 5 to develop the interventions and trained the teacher to use them. The study measured the percentage of intervention steps adhered to by the teachers, teachers’ attitudes toward the interventions, and the impact on student outcomes.
Using a multiple baseline across subjects design, this study found that the performance feedback meetings supported teacher adherence to the intervention in 50% of the teacher subjects. All teachers’ adherence to the intervention improved from teacher training to performance feedback meeting phases. A t-test for related measures revealed that with 99% confidence, the intervention positively impacted student grades. One implication is that a collaborative framework can support the precise implementation of reading comprehension interventions in the classroom which ultimately can improve student outcomes.