The Individuals with Disabilities Improvement Act (IDEA) was reauthorized by Congress in 2004 (IDEA, 2004). The new legislation permits educational practitioners to identify students suspected of having a learning disability by continuing to use the ability-achievement discrepancy model or by the analysis of the child's response to prescriptive intervention delivered through a systematic multi-tiered instructional intervention approach which has become to be known as Response to Intervention (RtI). However, the change in the federal legislation does not provide specific guidelines for the planning and implementation of intervention services.

The examination of the effectiveness of instructional intervention programs, the reliability of the ability-achievement discrepancy model to identify a child of having a suspected learning disability, and an introduction to the concept of Response to Intervention (RtI) is included in this work. The purpose of the present work is the development of a RtI Innovation Configuration Map that may be utilized as a guide for the planning, development, and implementation of a school-based RtI program that is also useful to assess the operationalization of a school-based RtI program in use. The procedures followed for the development of the RtI Innovation Configuration Map included the selection of a national review panel of educational practitioners from across the country to confirm the essential components and action steps to be considered when planning for the implementation of a RtI program. A RtI Innovation Configuration Map Team was selected from a school in Virginia that had successfully opertionalized a RtI program as a result of the schools participation in the Virginia Department of Education's RtI Initiative. The RtI Map Team developed a RtI Innovation Configuration Map that included varying levels of implementation of the essential components and action steps that were identified by the national review panel. To assess the utility of the RtI Innovation Configuration Map to illustrate the varying levels of implementation of a school-based RtI program, individuals from four schools taking part in the Virginia Department of Education's RtI initiative were randomly selected and interviewed regarding the RtI program being implemented in their school. Based on those interviews and other evidence obtained at the four schools, the utility of the RtI Innovation Configuration Map was revised.