1. Sarah’s Progress in Secondary Prevention
Screening
Instructional Decision
Monitoring Progress
Determining Eligibility
Sarah’s Progress in Secondary Prevention
Sarah’s slope: 1.9
Word Identification Fluency
Key Ideas:
Let’s look at a few student graphs and how decisions concerning RTI can be made using the graphs.
First-grade student, Sarah, was suspected of being at risk for reading difficulties after scoring below the CBM Word Identification Fluency (WIF) screening cut-off. Her progress in targeted intervention was monitored for 8 weeks. Sarah’s progress on the number of words read correctly looks like it’s increasing, and the slope is calculated to quantify the weekly increase and to confirm or disconfirm at-risk status.
Sarah’s slope is (16 – 3) ÷ 7 = 1.9. Her slope is above the first-grade cut-off of 1.8 for adequate growth in general education. Sarah is benefiting from the instruction provided in primary prevention, and she does not need secondary prevention at this time.
However we may also want to ask deeper questions to figure out next steps and anticipation of exiting intervention or transitioning to a different progress monitoring probe.
Personal Story: (feel free to swap out graph with one of your own if your district or cooperative has them.)
Presenter Tips:
Additional questions to ask:
What is the error rate?
How about comprehension?
What is happening to the error rate?
Is this mirrored with connected text?

2. Juanita’s Progress in Secondary Prevention
Screening
Instructional Decision
Monitoring Progress
Determining Eligibility
Juanita’s Progress in Secondary Prevention
Juanita’s slope: 0.0
Juanita is an ELL student. Teacher verified risk by progress monitoring for 5 weeks during primary prevention. The decision was made to start her in a secondary intervention.
Juanita ’ slope is (6 – 6) ÷ 7 = 0. Her slope is not above the first-grade cut-off of Juanita may need to move to a tertiary intervention in the future
What is happening to the error rate?

3. Malik’s Progress in Tertiary Prevention
Screening
Instructional Decision
Monitoring Progress
Determining Eligibility
Malik’s Progress in Tertiary Prevention
Malik’s slope: 2.0
This is Malik’s graph from primary through tertiary prevention. The dotted line shows the point when Malik entered secondary prevention. Malik has completed 20 weeks of prevention. His progress has been monitored weekly. Over 20 weeks of tutoring, Malik’s scores are increasing.
His slope is above the first-grade cut-off of 1.8 for growth in tertiary prevention. Malik can exit tertiary prevention at this time and fade back to secondary prevention.
I think what you are referring to is the moving median that the U teaches. In this process you do one probe each day (or whatever your time frame is) after 3 days you find the median and plot that on the graph. The next time you do a probe you take the median of the last 3 measures and plot that. AIMS does not plot the moving median, however if you make sure you have at least 8 data points then you can be confident that you are getting a true slope. Ted Christ and Don Compton or maybe it was the Fuchs (I'd have to look back on the study) both have done studies about the number of probes. It was found in the non-Christ study that using 3 probes less frequently didn't change the decision made based on weekly single probes. Christ has found that the SEM can be large and teachers needs to make decisions with caution. I think that message has been pretty strong in our trainings that decisions can't be based solely on the PM data points.
What is needed for Malik to exit?