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

[Kevin Cole]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 21:12, Caroline Meeks
<caroline at solutiongrove.com> wrote:
> 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?

Peripherally related (I think): About 25 years ago, as part of our
re-norming of the Stanford Achievement Test
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Achievement_Test_Series) for
deaf students across the US, we added a new feature.  We obtained the
source code to a a program known as "SPP: Student Problem Package".
See the reference here:

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED298133&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED298133

The version we obtained was, as I recall, not for the IBM PC but
rather for the PDP-11, and I was responsible for porting it to the
DECsystem-10.  In the process, I was asked to whittle it down a bit.
My memory's rusty but the thing that struck me as useful about the
program was that it would look at a class's performance on a test and
show how many students answered question 1 with "A", how many answered
"B", etc. with a primative graph and other statistics.  At a glance,
you could determine if several students were sharing the same
mis-understanding (or I suppose, cheating, but that wasn't the point).
 The idea was both to identify problems in comprehension, and badly
formed questions.

A classic funny example that came up in our design of "pre-tests" for
deaf students to determine the the appropriate level of the test to
give to each child.  One of Stanford's "throw-away" questions
consisted of a "read the paragraph and answer the questions".  In this
case it was a short letter on the fridge from "Mom and Dad" to "Sally
and Jimmy" saying that they'd be late getting home, and gave a list of
tasks for the children to perform.  One of those tasks was to remember
to "play ball with Buster".

In the question section, one of the questions was something like:

Buster is:
(a) a dog
(b) a cat
(c) a hamster
(d) none of the above

A surprising number of kids in our pilot answered (c), presumably
because both words ended with "ster".  However, it lead our office to
visions of a terrified little animal being tossed between two
children...

Anyway, considering SPP's age, it has probably evolved into something
entirely different, if it hasn't died completely.  But at the time, it
seemed quite good.  (I don't recall why we dropped that for later
editions of the Stanford reports we produce.)

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