Response To Intervention

In education, response to intervention (commonly abbreviated RTI or RtI) is a method of academic intervention used in the United States to provide early, systematic assistance to children who are having difficulty learning. RTI seeks to prevent academic failure through early intervention, frequent progress measurement, and increasingly intensive research-based instructional interventions for children who continue to have difficulty.

In terms of identifying learning disabilities, the RTI method was developed as an alternative to the ability–achievement "discrepancy model," which requires children to exhibit a discrepancy between their ability (often measured by IQ testing) and academic achievement (as measured by their grades and standardized testing). Proponents of RTI claim that the process brings more clarity to the Specific Learning Disability (SLD) category of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA 2004), while opponents claim that RTI simply identifies low achieving students rather than students with learning disabilities.