The Impact of Response to Intervention on Special Education Identification

Response to intervention is a process designed to provide students with interventions before they are identified as students who are served through special education services as students who have disabilities. RTI is a general education initiative that allows students to receive targeted interventions in their areas of weakness before they are referred to special education. The implementation of RTI has had a significant effect of education. This study explored the perceptions of how teachers and administrators felt regarding special education identification since the implementation of RTI. This study makes both theoretical and practical contributions to the fields of education and school leadership. This was a qualitative study, using semi-structured interviews and focus groups and an analysis of referral data three years prior and three years after the implementation of RTI. Purposeful sampling of teachers from four schools in one county was used to select the participants for the focus groups. Four administrators from the exact four schools were interviewed as well. An open coding method of analysis was used to analyze and interpret data. Four broad themes emerged from the data to address the research questions