Catch and Release: Predicting Maintenance of Tier 2 Reading Intervention Effects is a joint project with collaborators from ServeMinnesota and University of Wisconsin-Madison. The project is funded by the Institute of Education Sciences for 2021-2025. Through ongoing collaborations with ServeMinnesota, it was discovered that many students that initially show improvement in response to supplemental reading interventions, do not maintain those skills after they exit the intervention and return to receiving core instruction alone. This poses a potentially catastrophic problem to service delivery models like response to intervention or multi-tiered systems of support. Bi-directional movement between tiers of different instructional intensity are assumed. If students are not likely to maintain their newly acquired academic skills, continually delivering interventions over and over is not at all feasible.

 

This grant builds upon previous research conducted by Drs. Van Norman, Nelson, and Klingbeil to better understand what factors predict whether students will respond to targeted fluency interventions, and what factors predict whether students will maintain gains in reading fluency after interventions stop. More specifically, assessments that measure component skills of reading (e.g., word reading, phonics, alphabetic knowledge, etc.) will be administered pre and post intervention. Classroom observations that measure student engagement during reading instruction as well as strategies teachers use to deliver reading instruction will be collected. In addition, progress monitoring data will be collected weekly during and after the intervention. Dr. Van Norman and graduate research assistants from the QuALITY lab will help the research team uncover the relationship between various predictors and growth during and after the intervention.  We anticipate completing multiple peer-reviewed manuscripts and presenting this research at national and international conferences! You can read more about the project here.