[IAEP] Response to Intervention - Is this being used outside the US?

[forster at ozonline.com.au]

Caroline

Thanks for bring this to my attention, you have done a good video presentation of it. Testing (and tailoring instruction as a response) is coming back into fashion in Australia. Australia seems to lag the US in this. 

The US has had the No Child Left Behind for a while now, which has an emphasis on testing. The Australian government has just introduced the Myschool site http://www.myschool.edu.au/ which lists schools by their two yearly test results. The results are moderated by the school's socioeconomic status. The justification is that it rewards effective teaching and gives parents the opportunity to vote with their feet.

The strongest argument against is that any easily administered testing is biased towards lower level skills (as defined in Bloom's taxonomy). That would be OK, depending on how the data is used. Any attempt to modify teaching in response, biases the teaching towards the lower level skills.

In the Australian case, schools will be forced to confine their teaching to lower order skills to maintain their ranking, preserve enrolments and avoid criticism and funding cuts. In the case of RTI, it risks defining student progress by a narrow subset of education skills and overly concentrating teaching on this narrow subset.

Tony 



> This is a simple, yet powerful idea of tracking student progress in real
> time and trying different interventions to see what works.
> 
> I give a brief three minute description here:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI95fgBnJWI
> 
> There is a great deal on the web about RTI but everything I have seen in
> class or on the web is US.  I'm wondering if maybe a similar concept is
> being used under a different name else where?
> 
> Thanks,
> Caroline
> 
> -- 
> Caroline Meeks
> Solution Grove
> Caroline at SolutionGrove.com
> 
> 617-500-3488 - Office
> 505-213-3268 - Fax
> This is a simple, yet powerful idea of tracking student progress in real time and trying different interventions to see what works.<div><br></div><div>I give a brief three minute description here:�<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI95fgBnJWI">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI95fgBnJWI</a></div>
> 
> <div><br></div><div>There is a great deal on the web about RTI but everything I have seen in class or on the web is US. �I'm wondering if maybe a similar concept is being used under a different name else where?</div>
> <div>
> <br></div><div>Thanks,</div><div>Caroline<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Caroline Meeks<br>Solution Grove<br>Caroline at SolutionGrove.com<br><br>617-500-3488 - Office<br>505-213-3268 - Fax<br>
> </div>
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep