The Consumer Reports of Intensive Interventions for Reading, Mathematics, and Behavior
By Michael Solis
In the second decade of the 21st Century there is certainly no shortage of information available on the Internet. In fact, rather than quantity of information being a significant problem, it appears that finding high quality information that can be trusted is the bigger challenge. Fortunately, teachers and school administrators now have access to a wealth of high-quality information regarding different approaches to providing intensive intervention for school-aged children.
The National Center on Intensive Intervention (NCII) () provides technical assistance to districts and schools to support implementation of data-based individualization in reading, mathematics, and behavior for students with severe and persistent learning or behavioral needs. The Center is housed at the American Institutes for Research and works in conjunction with leading experts in the field. It is funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) and is part of OSEP’s Technical Assistance and Dissemination Network (TA&D).
There are a number of different supports provided by NCII to assist school personnel in getting started with intensive intervention. Tool charts review commercially available interventions and progress monitoring tools that may be used to support intensive intervention in academics or behavior. Reviews are based on a standard process for evaluating the scientific rigor of each commercially available intervention or tool. The Center also hosts a series of webinars on various topics related to intensive intervention, and posts short video clips featuring experts in the field addressing frequently asked questions. Additional resources on the website provide implementation and instructional supports, including a series of training modules, materials to support team meetings, tools for monitoring implementation fidelity sample lesson plans, activities, and a series of documents illustrating standards-aligned instruction across levels of a multi-tiered system. NCII emails a quarterly newsletter to ensure that educators stay up to date with the latest information (sign up at http:///).