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Rationale for Pennsylvania's Secondary RtII Research to Practice Initiative
There is widespread national, state, and local support for the implementation of Response to Intervention (RTI). The intent of RTI in Pennsylvania is to assist schools with the establishment of a standards-aligned comprehensive school improvement framework that reinforces high-quality core curriculum and instruction and the adoption of a continuum of evidencebased practices intended to maximize academic and behavioral outcomes for all students. The need to systematically prevent and effectively treat early reading failure, as well as increase adolescent literacy outcomes, lies at the heart of both elementary and secondary adoption and intended outcomes. While literacy has been the initial area of emphasis for Pennsylvania's middle school learning sites, there has been integration of tiered supports for mathematics and positive behavior support as well. It should be noted that Pennsylvania's multi-tiered model is referred to as "Response to Instruction and Intervention (RtII)" to underscore the importance of highquality, standards aligned core instruction for ALL students (see Figure 1 ).
Based upon the aforementioned rationale, Pennsylvania has committed to a long-term project that was initiated in 20092010 and involves the study and evaluation of secondary RTI implementation among five (and more recently six) middle schools located in the eastern, central, and western regions.
The project (Pennsylvania's Secondary RtII Learning Site Project) acknowledges that while limited research exists relative to the impact of secondary RTI implementation efforts, there is a need to learn more about the unique implementation challenges that exist at the secondary level. For example, administrators commonly report that changes in organizational structure, a shift in academic foci, and a general increase in extracurricular responsibilities, represent some of the strongest contrasts between elementary and secondary implementation considerations. Nonetheless, the path to improved secondary RTI outcomes is still believed to be attributable to persistence around quality implementation that includes the ongoing monitoring, evaluation, and refinement of those practices that have been shown to work within a data-driven and collaborative school climate. Similarly, Pennsylvania's Secondary RtII Learning Site Project was designed with this intent and subsequent outcomes in mind.
Characteristics of Pennsylvania's Secondary RtII Model
According to a review of the literature, RTI models share many common components including high-quality core instruction, universal screening, progress-monitoring, tiered intervention, and...