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

[Kevin Cole]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 12:34, Kevin Cole <dc.loco at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.)

P.S. After a bit of digging, I turned up a page on Del Harnish, the
brain behind SPP.

http://cehs15.unl.edu/fsinfo/cehs_pull.php?UserName=dharnisch&Department=Teaching%2C+Learning+and+Teacher+Education&

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