Referral Decision for a Multilingual Second Grader
Sofía is a second grader whose home language is Spanish and who has received English-medium instruction for two years. Fall screening shows oral reading fluency of 28 words correct per minute, below the district benchmark of 50, and 32 of 40 letter sounds correct. The school placed her in Tier 2 intervention for 10 weeks: 30 minutes, three times weekly, in a group of five. Weekly progress monitoring began at 24 wcpm and now shows 27 wcpm, a slope of 0.3 words per week; the district goal is 1.2 words per week. Her teacher reports that Sofía reverses b and d, guesses at words, and avoids reading aloud, but she participates well in Spanish oral storytelling and her Spanish receptive vocabulary is strong. English vocabulary is limited. Attendance is 92%, and vision and hearing screenings are normal. The student support team is meeting to decide whether to refer her for special education evaluation.
1. Interpret Sofía's screening and progress data. What conclusions are justified, and what conclusions are not?
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The data justify concern but not a disability label.
- Justified: Sofía is below benchmark and her slope (0.3 wcpm/week) is far below the district goal (1.2). Ten weeks of Tier 2 has not closed the gap. She has word-reading errors and avoids reading aloud.
- Not justified: that she has dyslexia or a specific learning disability. A 3-point gain could reflect a weak intervention, poor fidelity, attendance, or English language development. Her strong Spanish oral storytelling and receptive vocabulary show that her language system is not generally impaired. Her English vocabulary is limited, which can depress English oral reading fluency.
- Confounders: 92% attendance is not severe but should be checked; the group of five may be too large; the intervention may target fluency rather than her letter-sound and decoding needs.
- Comparison: she should be compared with true peers-multilingual learners with similar English exposure-not only with monolingual benchmarks. The team should not say she failed RTI and stop there; it should ask whether RTI was implemented as designed and whether the measures are valid for her language background.
2. What should the team do next: continue Tier 2, change intervention, or refer for evaluation? Justify with specific data and safeguards.
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The team should refer for a comprehensive evaluation while continuing and strengthening intervention. Reasons:
- The problem is persistent and not explained fully by attendance or sensory factors.
- She shows a pattern of word-level errors plus avoidance, and her progress slope is flat despite 10 weeks.
- Waiting another 10 weeks without changing the intervention would risk delaying needed support. Safeguards:
- Audit fidelity: observe the intervention, check schedule logs, and verify that the program targets letter sounds and blending, not only repeated reading.
- Assess in both languages: Spanish and English letter-word identification, phonological awareness, and oral language; use a bilingual examiner or trained interpreter, not an aide without assessment training.
- Use multiple sources: classroom observations, work samples, parent interview, and RTI data.
- Apply exclusionary factors: limited English proficiency, attendance, and inadequate instruction must be ruled out as primary causes.
- Continue Tier 2 during evaluation so she is not left without support. This is neither wait to fail nor a rush to label. The referral is justified by insufficient response, but eligibility depends on the comprehensive data.
3. Identify two assessment practices that would reduce the risk of misidentifying Sofía and explain how each changes the interpretation of her scores.
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Two practices:
- Native-language and cross-language assessment: Give phonological awareness and decoding measures in Spanish and English, and compare error patterns. If Sofía shows the same word-reading difficulty in Spanish, a language difference is less likely to explain the profile. If her Spanish decoding is strong and only English is weak, the team should weigh English language proficiency more heavily. This changes interpretation from disability to an unresolved language and instruction question.
- Dynamic assessment or a brief trial-teach: Teach a small set of letter-sound correspondences or blending with explicit modeling, then measure how quickly she learns with scaffolding. A student with a language difference often responds to good instruction; a student with a word-reading disability may need much more repetition and still show limited transfer. This changes the conclusion from a static score to how much and what kind of support she needs. A third safeguard is a bilingual verifier who reviews the patterns and the intervention fidelity. The key is that no single English score should determine eligibility.