Assessment, Intervention, and Instructional Design
Assessment, Intervention, and Instructional Design
This domain tests data-based decisions across screening, diagnosis, progress monitoring, and intervention. Items address MTSS/RTI tiers, reliability and validity, benchmark and norm-referenced scores, and instructional matching. You must choose the right assessment purpose and avoid overinterpreting a single score.
Core rules and concepts
- Screening identifies risk; diagnostic assessment pinpoints skill gaps; progress monitoring measures response to intervention.
- Use reliable, valid measures for the purpose; a benchmark score is not a diagnosis.
- MTSS typically has Tier 1 core instruction, Tier 2 targeted intervention, and Tier 3 intensive intervention.
- Progress monitoring should be frequent (e.g., weekly or biweekly), graphed, and used to adjust instruction.
- Intervention must align with the assessed deficit and be delivered with fidelity.
- Decisions about disability require multiple data sources and insufficient response, not one low score.
Worked example
Universal screening shows 30% of second graders below benchmark in word reading. The next step is diagnostic assessment for those students to identify decoding gaps, not placing all 30% in Tier 3. Then provide Tier 2 explicit phonics intervention and monitor weekly; if progress is flat after a set period, intensify and check fidelity.
Traps that cost marks
- Using a screening tool as a diagnostic tool.
- Changing intervention before enough progress-monitoring data exist.
- Ignoring fidelity when students do not respond.
- Making special-education eligibility decisions from a single benchmark score.
- Monitoring too infrequently to see growth.