Abstract
The purpose of the current article is to reintroduce Shapiro and Clemens for the series honoring the anniversary of the journal. Shapiro and Clemens suggests five measurable indicators from three domains that schools could use to evaluate response to intervention frameworks. The article also highlights some accomplishments of our editorial team.
I am honored to have my name included in the list of Past Editors of Assessment for Effective Intervention (AEI) and to contribute to this anniversary issue. My editorial team took the reins from Drs. Linda and Nick Elksnin in 2008, beginning with Issue 4 of Volume 33 and ending with Issue 2 of Volume 36. My three priorities as Editor were to (a) enhance the scientific standing of the journal, (b) provide consumable articles to the readers, and (c) advance the field, and we accomplished all three. During my tenure as Editor, the journal started a Brief/Psychometric Reports section to publish well-designed evaluations of psychometric properties of scales, stopped publishing test reviews, increased the size and diversity of the editorial board, and started Associate Editor positions that were not tied to specific submissions such as test reviews (Dr. John Hosp and Dr. AmandaVanDerHeyden were the first Associate Editors of the journal).
Drs. Elksnin transitioned AEI into its modern era and pushed educational assessment research to focus on the implications of collecting the data instead of testing predictions from them. However, the transition was slow as the field gradually caught up with their vision. During my first year as Editor, we received 25 unsolicited submissions, which was substantially higher than the previous year, but the number of submissions continued to increase. We published 65 articles across 11 issues, along with 11 editorials and test reviews (see Burns et al., 2011 for a summary of the research). Each article has been cited an average of 23.34 times (SD = 20.28) according to Scopus, and some have been cited over 100 times (e.g., Chafouleas et al., 2009; Christ et al., 2009; Masterson & Apel, 2010).
Given the outstanding research that was published in AEI, it was difficult to select one article to highlight for this series. The article that I believe warrants additional attention is Shapiro and Clemens (2009) that appears in issue 1 of volume 35. The article reviewed the research to suggest five measurable indicators from three domains that schools could use to evaluate outcomes associated with their response to intervention (RTI) framework. The authors then provided data to demonstrate how to assess the measures they outlined, (a) risk levels across benchmark periods, (b) risk levels across measures, (c) movement between tiers, (d) movement within tiers, and (e) accuracy to referrals for special education.
Why the Article Was Meaningful
As most readers already know, RTI became law in the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act with considerable enthusiasm from many of us. By 2010, 71% of schools were implementing the framework (Spectrum K-12 School Solutions, 2010) as part of the process to identify students with a specific learning disability (SLD), but in our rush to implement RTI, we did not adequately consider how to evaluate it. Shapiro and Clemens were among the first to discuss the importance of evaluating our efforts and may have been the first to provide a framework.
In 2009, the focus on RTI was still on identifying SLD and the term multitiered system of support (MTSS) did not appear in legislation until the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act. Shapiro and Clemens discussed the need to examine special education referrals when evaluating RTI, but their prescient suggestions to examine risk and movement within and across tiers reshaped the conversation to focus more on tiers of intervention and student outcomes than SLD identification. In other words, they pushed for an MTSS approach before MTSS was established as the umbrella for RTI and provided a framework to make the transition.
Contemporary Implications for Special Education Assessment
Today, it is hard to imagine any schools not implementing MTSS in some form, but few probably undertake a formal evaluation of the outcomes. It might make some sense to consider referrals to identify or rule out a special education disability as part of the evaluation efforts, but examining rates of proficiency across time and measures, increases in student skill within the tier, and frequency of movement to less intense tiers (e.g., moving from Tier 3 to Tier 2) remain important data regardless of the focus of the MTSS (e.g., behavior, math, or reading). As the framework evolved from RTI to MTSS, decisions also shifted from primarily SLD identification to principally improving student outcomes.
Shapiro and Clemens (2009) also challenged our assessment practices to address “big problems” or “systemic issues that undergird academic failure” (p. 561), such as rates of illiteracy among our students or lack of overall academic competence and resiliency. The systems perspective for which Shapiro and Clemens argued will also help identify gaps or systems-level failures that can be remediated. The average score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress among fourth-grade students was 217 in 1992, and it declined almost every year until it was 213 in 2000 (National Center on Educational Statistics, 2022). After RTI, and MTSS were implemented, the average score either increased or remained the same until it reached a high of 223 in 2015, but in 2022 it fell back to the 1992 level of 217. There are clearly systems issues that need to be addressed, and Shapiro and Clemens provided an approach to formatively evaluate our progress toward remediating them. Thus, the information provided in their article remains relevant and important today.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
