Changes in legislation and the policies of education (e.g., NCLB 2002, IDEA 2004), the potential benefits of response-to-intervention (RTI), and government funds to support early intervention have made RTI a prominent issue in current education. To prepare teachers for implementing RTI, there are several government-sponsored online professional development programs available for public use. For example, the IDEA '04 and Research for Inclusive Settings (IRIS) Center at Vanderbilt University, sponsored by the Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), has developed several modules about RTI. However, although over 470,000 teachers and teacher educators have participated in online learning through IRIS, there is little empirical research to support its impact on preservice teachers. To fill the gap in this literature, this study incorporated ANGEL software to examine how effective IRIS-RTI modules are for improving preservice teachers' knowledge of RTI in the academic domain, and how they influence preservice teachers' perspectives toward RTI. A total of 55 pre-service teachers enrolled in a special education teacher preparation program at a large Midwest public university, voluntarily participated in this study. Students were rank ordered based on a pre-assessment score and then stratified into two groups (e.g., odd numbers and even numbers). Twenty-six of them were assigned to the experimental group (five juniors, sixteen seniors, and five interns) and twenty-nine of them were assigned to the control group (eight juniors, seventeen seniors, and four interns). The experimental group received eight IRIS-RTI modules, while a treated control group received eight IRIS modules not related to RTI. A key finding is that through comparisons across three different test resources (i.e., 66 Teacher Knowledge Survey test items, 29 IRIS test items, and 25 Literature test items) the results indicate that the eight IRIS modules significantly improved the knowledge of the experimental group when compared to the control condition, particularly on the 29 IRIS test items. However, because RTI is such a complex and multi-faceted, using the eight modules as a one-time exposure cannot be expected to provide the breadth or depth of knowledge needed to fully understand or implement RTI. Further investigation is needed to understand how preservice teachers retain the knowledge and skills that they learn from IRIS modules and how teacher educators adjust their instruction accordingly, based on preservice teachers' performance on a more comprehensive measure after taking the IRIS modules.
Read
