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The Efficacy of the POMDP-RTI Approach for Early Reading Intervention

A POMDP is a tool for planning: selecting a policy that will lead to an optimal outcome. Response to intervention (RTI) is an approach to instruction, where teachers craft individual plans for students based on the results of progress monitoring tests. Current practice assigns students into tiers of instruction at each time point based on cut scores on the most recent test. This paper explores whether a tier assignment policy determined by a POMDP model in a RTI setting offer advantages over the current practice. Simulated data sets were used to compare the two approaches; the model had a single latent reading construct and two observed reading measures: Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) for phonological awareness and Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) for phonological decoding. The two simulation studies compared how the students were placed into instructional groups using the two approaches, POMDP-RTI and RTI. This paper explored the efficacy of using a POMDP to select and apply appropriate instruction.