Academic Skills Problems ─ Direct Assessment and Intervention

This text presents a problem-solving-based approach to evaluating and remediating academic skills problems. Leading authority Edward S. Shapiro provides practical strategies for working with students across all grade levels (K-12) who are struggling with reading, spelling, written language, or math. Incorporating the latest advances in evidence-based assessment and instruction, the fourth edition shows how the author's model fits perfectly into a response-to-intervention (RTI) framework.

Shapiro emphasizes the importance of evaluating academic skills in the context of the school curriculum. He offers step-by-step guidelines for assessing students' learning and their instructional environment through the use of systematic observation, rating scales, teacher and student interviews, examination of student-produced work, and skills probes. The book explains how to integrate and use the resulting data to design appropriate instructional modifications. It also describes progress monitoring procedures for determining both the short- and long-term outcomes of interventions. Research supporting the approach is clearly summarized. Special features include helpful figures, tables, and sample forms—many of which are new or revised—as well as in-depth case examples. A new chapter and case example in the fourth edition focus specifically on direct assessment and intervention within RTI. The companion workbook, available separately, contains practice exercises and reproducible forms.

Edward S. Shapiro, PhD, is Director of the Center for Promoting Research to Practice and Professor in the School Psychology Program at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is a winner of the Senior Scientist Award given by the Division of School Psychology of the American Psychological Association and a past Editor of School Psychology Review, the official journal of the National Association of School Psychologists. Dr. Shapiro has written numerous books and other publications in the areas of curriculum-based assessment, behavioral assessment, behavioral interventions, and pediatric school psychology. He is best known for his work in curriculum-based assessment and nonstandardized methods of assessing academic skills problems. Among his many projects, Dr. Shapiro has recently completed a federal project focused on the development of a multi-tiered RTI model in two districts in Pennsylvania. He has been working as a consultant to facilitate the implementation of RTI with the Pennsylvania Department of Education as well as with many individual school districts across the country. He also co-directs a training grant from the U.S. Department of Education to train preservice school psychologists as facilitators and developers of RTI implementation.