Academic and Behavioral Intervention Within MTSS
Intervention items ask you to design, monitor, and adjust academic and behavioral supports within a multi-tiered system, and to link data to decisions about intensity and special education referral.
MTSS structure
- Tier 1: core instruction and universal PBIS for all students, with screening three times yearly.
- Tier 2: targeted, standardized small-group intervention (for example 20–30 minutes, 3–5 days per week, 8–12 weeks) with progress monitoring every one to two weeks.
- Tier 3: individualized, more intensive, longer duration; may precede or accompany a referral.
- Fidelity (treatment integrity) must be documented before concluding an intervention "didn't work."
Progress monitoring and decisions
- Set ambitious but realistic goals using end-of-year benchmarks or rate of improvement.
- Four consecutive data points below the goal line, or a flat trend despite documented fidelity, triggers a problem-solving review.
- Dual discrepancy: low level and low growth relative to peers.
Behavior
- FBA identifies antecedent, behavior, and consequence; functional analysis confirms the reinforcer (attention, escape, access to tangibles, automatic/sensory).
- Build a BIP around a functionally equivalent replacement behavior, teach it, reinforce it, and plan for an extinction burst.
- Schedules: DRA (alternative behavior), DRI (incompatible), DRO (absence of behavior), response cost, token economies.
Worked example
A fifth grader yells out during independent work, and the FBA shows the behavior reliably ends the task. The function is escape. A BIP offering a break card plus a reduced task with reinforcement for completion is functionally matched; a token reward for silence alone is not, because it teaches no appropriate escape.
Traps
Changing interventions before enough data accumulate; calling a Tier 2 failure a disability without fidelity data; and writing a BIP that is not linked to the FBA's identified function.