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| Reading Intervention in Grades K-12: Scientifically Informed Policy |
| Saturday, May 29, 2010 |
| 4:00 PM–4:50 PM |
| 103AB (CC) |
| Area: EDC; Domain: Applied Behavior Analysis |
| Chair: Cathy L. Watkins (California State University, Stanislaus) |
| BARBARA R. FOORMAN (Florida State University) |
 Barbara Foorman, Ph.D., holds a joint appointment as the Francis Eppes Professor of Education and Director of the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University. During 2005, Dr. Foorman served as the Commissioner of Education Research in the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education. Before that Dr. Foorman was a professor at the University of Texas-Houston and at the University of Houston. Dr. Foorman has over 120 publications in the area of reading and language development, is co-editor of the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and has been principal investigator of federally-funded grants on early reading interventions, scaling assessment-driven instruction, and literacy development in Spanish-speaking children. She has been a member of several national consensus committees related to reading. She also leads professional development and technical assistance grants in Florida and for the national Center on Instruction—Reading Strand. Dr. Foorman is an author of vocabulary, spelling, and phonemic awareness curricula and is a primary author of the TPRI early reading assessment and the FAIR K-12 formative reading assessments used in Florida. |
| Abstract: The state of the art in reading remediation is prevention and early intervention. Because of the difficulty of remediating older students and the relative success of early intervention efforts, policy in the United States encourages prevention. Under the Individuals With Disabilities Educational Improvement Act of 2004 districts may use up to 15% of special education funds for prevention and early intervention. This shift in federal law allows districts to use funds to provide intervention to struggling readers before they fail to meet grade-level achievement standards. In addition, the new law provides an alternative to the previous requirement that students’ low achievement be unexpected (i.e., discrepant) relative to their intelligence in order to qualify them for special education services. The alternative approach, called response to intervention (RTI), means that a local education agency “may use a process that determines if the child responds to scientific, research-based intervention as a part of the evaluation procedures” (Pub. L. No. 108-446 § 614 [b][6][A]; § 614 [b] [2 & 3]). In this presentation Dr. Foorman will review the evidence for effective reading interventions, at both the elementary and secondary levels. Additionally, she will discuss challenges to implementing RTI models in schools and offer possible solutions. |
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