Hierarchy of Learning and MTSS
TARGETING INTERVENTION: THE INSTRUCTIONAL HIERARCHY IN PRACTICE
PURPOSE
Teams often have structures in place for an MTSS framework. But, targeting intervention and matching student need can be a barrier to effective outcomes.
The Instructional Hierarchy can be used alongside screening, progress-monitoring, and targeted diagnostic data to help teams distinguish among Acquisition, Fluency, and Generalization/Adaptation needs. The goal is to identify the instructional problem before selecting an intervention and to reduce intervention mismatch within MTSS.
The framework is a problem-solving tool. The research cited here does not establish a single universal screening algorithm or a single intervention for every student at a particular stage.
THE INSTRUCTIONAL HIERARCHY
The Instructional Hierarchy described by Haring and Eaton (1978) provides a framework for understanding how academic skills develop. The original model describes four stages:
Acquisition
Fluency
Generalization
Adaptation
For practical MTSS decision making, Generalization and Adaptation can be combined into a single Generalization/Adaptation stage. This is a practical simplification of the original model, not a representation of the original hierarchy as a three-stage model.
The progression can therefore be summarized for practical use as follows:
Acquisition → Fluency → Generalization/Adaptation
Acquisition: The student is learning to perform the skill accurately. Instruction emphasizes establishing reliable, correct responding.
Fluency: The student can perform the skill accurately but needs greater speed, efficiency, consistency, or automaticity.
Generalization/Adaptation: The student can perform the skill accurately and fluently but has difficulty using, discriminating, or adapting the skill across different contexts and task demands.
The instructional problem changes as the student’s performance changes. The goal is not simply to provide more intensive instruction. Rather, instruction should address what is preventing successful performance at the student’s current stage.
The intervention should match the student’s current instructional need, not simply the student’s overall level of performance.
WHY INTERVENTION MATCHING MATTERS
When selecting Tier 2 or Tier 3 interventions, teams may default to interventions that are familiar, readily available, easy to schedule, or already used by staff (Burns et al., 2012).
A more useful approach is to first determine what the student can and cannot yet do, identify the most likely instructional problem, and then select instruction that addresses that problem.
For example:
A student who is inaccurate may need instruction that establishes accurate performance.
A student who is accurate but slow may need opportunities to build automaticity and efficiency.
A student who is accurate and fluent but has difficulty applying the skill in new contexts may need opportunities to generalize, discriminate, or adapt the skill.
This distinction can help prevent intervention mismatch, in which an intervention emphasizes a skill that is not the student’s primary instructional need.
THE THREE PRACTICAL STAGES FOR MTSS DECISION MAKING
1. Acquisition
Student Profile: Performance is inaccurate, inconsistent, or still developing. The student has not yet established reliable control of the skill.
Instructional Goal: Build accurate and reliable performance.
Typical Instruction: Explicit instruction, modeling, guided practice, prompting, immediate corrective feedback, and frequent opportunities to respond.
2. Fluency
Student Profile: The student performs the skill accurately but slowly, effortfully, or inconsistently.
Instructional Goal: Build efficiency, consistency, and increasingly automatic performance.
Typical Instruction: Repeated practice, appropriately designed timed or paced practice, feedback, and increased opportunities for independent responding.
Note: Fluency instruction should not simply emphasize speed. Accuracy should remain established while efficiency and automaticity are developed.
3. Generalization/Adaptation
Student Profile: The student performs the skill accurately and fluently but has difficulty using it across contexts, discriminating it from similar skills, or adapting it to novel task demands.
Instructional Goal: Build flexible application.
Typical Instruction: Varied practice, novel examples, discrimination practice, reduced prompts, application, problem solving, and opportunities to adapt the skill.
A SIMPLE DECISION RULE
This decision rule adapts the Instructional Hierarchy (Haring & Eaton, 1978) into a practical problem-solving logic for intervention matching (Burns et al., 2012). Use the hierarchy as a working instructional hypothesis:
Is the student accurate?
If No, investigate an Acquisition-level need.
If accurate, is the student sufficiently fluent?
If No, investigate a Fluency-level need.
If accurate and fluent, can the student use the skill across contexts and task demands?
If No, investigate a Generalization/Adaptation-level need.
These stages are not permanent student classifications. A student may be at different stages for different skills, and the appropriate instructional focus should change as performance develops.
APPLYING THE HIERARCHY TO READING
Universal Screening With MAP Growth and Additional Assessment
MAP Growth is a widely used universal screener and the purpose here is not to single it out as insufficient. In my opinion, it is one of the best psychometrically and for efficiency. But, at times, I have heard that teachers miss hearing a student read out loud or a student struggling with decoding may be able to perform well based on context in passages or items. The MAP achievement percentile can provide broad information about a student’s relative reading performance. However, a broad computer-adaptive achievement measure does not by itself determine the specific instructional problem responsible for a student’s performance.
For students identified as potentially at risk, additional brief assessment can provide information that is more directly related to specific skills.
Gated Screening
Research on gated screening suggests that using a second measure only for students who meet an initial risk criterion can increase screening specificity and reduce unnecessary follow-up assessment. Specificity refers to a screener's ability to correctly identify students who are truly not at risk, ensuring that resources are focused on students who need them and avoiding unnecessary follow-up testing. However, gated approaches can also reduce sensitivity (a screener's ability to correctly identify students who are truly at risk), meaning that some students who need additional support may not be identified by the first gate (Van Norman et al., 2017). Therefore, a gated approach should be treated as a district decision-making strategy rather than as a universally superior screening model.
Research examining MAP and other reading measures has also found that the usefulness of individual measures and combinations of measures can vary by grade (Klingbeil et al., 2017).
Practical District Model
A district using MAP Growth as its primary screener could consider the following problem-solving sequence:
Step 1: Universal Screening (MAP Growth Reading)
Does the student's performance meet the district criterion for additional review? Teams could also consider if a student has a history of reading intervention in prior years.
NO: Continue Core Instruction
YES: Proceed to Step 2
Step 2: Grade-Specific Targeted Information
Collect targeted information appropriate to grade and suspected problem area:
Grades 1–3: Administer brief ORF Probe to check Accuracy & Rate
Low Accuracy: Acquisition Need (Focus on Decoding)
High Accuracy / Low Rate: Fluency Need (Focus on Automaticity)
Grades 4+: Review performance patterns, MAP Goal Areas, and broader diagnostic measures
This sequence is an application of the research, not a validated MAP-to-ORF algorithm.
SETTING THE MAP DECISION CRITERION
Districts may choose different MAP percentile criteria depending on the purpose of the decision, local validation data, and available assessment and intervention resources.
For example, a district might investigate the consequences of using a 25th-percentile criterion versus a 35th-percentile criterion.
A lower criterion generally identifies fewer students for additional assessment. A higher criterion identifies more students and may provide a broader monitoring net, but also increases the number of students requiring follow-up assessment and potentially intervention.
Neither the 25th nor 35th percentile should be presented as a universally validated MAP cutoff for intervention eligibility. Districts should examine local data, intervention capacity, false-negative and false-positive consequences, and the purpose of the screening decision when establishing their criteria.
Importantly, a student above the selected MAP criterion should not automatically be assumed to have no reading difficulty. Teacher concern, classroom performance, other assessment data, and progress over time remain relevant.
GRADES 1–3: USING ORF AS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
For students in Grades 1–3 who meet a district criterion for additional review, a brief ORF probe can provide useful information about reading accuracy and rate.
ORF should not be used as a stand-alone diagnostic test. Accuracy, rate, error patterns, grade-level expectations, and other assessment information should be considered together.
ORF Accuracy Findings From Burns et al. (2026)
Burns, Contesse, and Lane (2026) examined ORF accuracy criteria associated with difficulty on a decoding measure in students in Grades 1–3.
Their analyses identified:
Grade 1: approximately 83% accuracy
Grade 2: approximately 93% accuracy
Grade 3: approximately 94% accuracy
The study also found that some alternative criteria, including approximately 85% for Grade 1 and 90% for Grade 2, were similarly supported.
These findings provide useful decision-support ranges, but they should not be treated as universal diagnostic cut scores. The study involved students from one district and used Nonsense Word Fluency as the criterion measure. The values therefore provide evidence that ORF accuracy can help identify possible decoding difficulty, but they do not establish that a particular accuracy percentage proves that a student has an Acquisition deficit.
Practical Interpretation/Suggestion
Grade 1: Approximately 85% accuracy or below
Possible interpretation: The student may have difficulty with accurate word reading or underlying decoding skills.
Instructional implication: Examine errors and consider whether explicit foundational decoding instruction is warranted.
Grade 2: Approximately 90% accuracy or below
Possible interpretation: The student may have difficulty with accurate word reading or underlying decoding skills.
Instructional implication: Examine errors and consider whether instruction targeting decoding or word-recognition skills is warranted.
These are practice suggestions based on my judgment, informed by the study. Grade 2: 90% flags fewer students but misses more; use 93% if missing a student costs more than extra follow-up. Grade 3: 95% falls between the study's tested cutoffs.
Grade 3: Approximately 95% accuracy or below
Possible interpretation: The student may have difficulty with accurate word reading or underlying decoding skills.
Instructional implication: Examine errors and consider whether instruction targeting decoding or word-recognition skills is warranted.
Grades 1–3: Adequate accuracy with low reading rate
Possible interpretation: Accuracy appears relatively established, but reading efficiency or automaticity may be weak.
Instructional implication: Consider a Fluency-level intervention if other evidence supports this interpretation.
Important Caveat
These values should be treated as decision-support criteria, not pass/fail boundaries. Teams should consider:
MAP performance
ORF accuracy
ORF rate
Error patterns
Decoding measures
Classroom performance
Grade level
Instructional history
Language and learning factors
Progress-monitoring data
The purpose of ORF accuracy screening is to generate a more informed instructional hypothesis, not to diagnose the student from one percentage.
GRADE 3: TRANSITION PHASE
Grade 3 represents an important transition in which reading assessment increasingly requires attention to both foundational reading skills and language comprehension.
For students identified as potentially at risk, ORF can provide information about accuracy and fluency while MAP goal-area information can help generate hypotheses about areas such as vocabulary, literary text, and informational text.
Teams should avoid assuming that a low MAP score represents a particular comprehension or vocabulary deficit without additional evidence.
GRADE 4 AND BEYOND: BROADER DIAGNOSTIC PROBLEM SOLVING
By Grade 4 and beyond, teams should not assume that a low MAP score identifies a particular instructional deficit.
Students with low reading performance may have different profiles involving:
A history of intervention (possibly decoding, then fluency, progressing to comprehension needs)
Word recognition or decoding
Reading fluency
Vocabulary
Language comprehension
Background knowledge
Comprehension processes
Ability to apply established skills to increasingly complex text
MAP goal-area information can help generate hypotheses about areas requiring additional investigation, but goal-area scores should not automatically determine the intervention.
Practical Approach
Review broad screening data: Use MAP performance as one source of evidence about overall reading performance.
Examine the student’s performance pattern: Review past performance and monitoring from previous years. Consider classroom work, teacher observations, progress-monitoring data, and available reading measures (e.g., State Test).
Determine whether foundational skills remain a concern: If decoding or fluency concerns are evident, use targeted measures to determine the nature of the problem.
Investigate comprehension and language-related factors when appropriate: Depending on the student’s profile, teams may examine vocabulary, language comprehension, background knowledge, text structure, comprehension strategies, and other relevant skills.
Select intervention based on the confirmed instructional need: Do not assume that a low overall MAP score automatically calls for a particular intervention. Look for a pattern over time.
USING SCREENING DATA TO MATCH INTERVENTION
Example 1: Low Accuracy
Grade 2 student below the district MAP criterion
MAP Reading: 18th percentile
ORF accuracy: 80%
ORF rate: Below expected level
Error analysis: Frequent decoding errors
Working interpretation: The student demonstrates a pattern consistent with a possible Acquisition-level need.
Instructional response: Prioritize explicit instruction in the specific decoding skills indicated by error analysis, with modeling, guided practice, corrective feedback, and sufficient opportunities for accurate practice.
Avoid: Making reading speed the primary instructional target before accurate performance has been established.
Example 2: Adequate Accuracy With Low Rate
Grade 2 student below the district MAP criterion
MAP Reading: 22nd percentile
ORF accuracy: 96%
ORF rate: Below expected level
Decoding assessment: Relatively adequate
Working interpretation: The student demonstrates relatively strong accuracy but may have a Fluency-level need involving reading efficiency or automaticity.
Instructional response: Consider appropriately designed repeated reading, phrase-level practice, modeling, paced practice, feedback, and other evidence-based fluency practices.
Avoid: Automatically assigning intensive foundational decoding instruction when available evidence indicates that the student’s basic word-reading accuracy is relatively established.
Example 3: Adequate Accuracy and Fluency With Weak Application
Grade 4 student below the district MAP criterion
MAP Reading: 20th percentile
ORF accuracy and rate: Relatively adequate
MAP goal areas: Low performance in selected comprehension-related areas
Classroom work: Difficulty understanding and applying information from grade-level text
Working interpretation: The student does not appear to have a primary basic accuracy or fluency problem. Further assessment may indicate needs involving vocabulary, background knowledge, language comprehension, comprehension processes, or application of established skills.
Instructional response: Provide instruction that addresses the identified comprehension or language-related need while giving the student opportunities to apply established reading skills across varied texts and task demands.
OPERATIONALIZING THE HIERARCHY WITHIN MTSS
1. Use Gated Screening as a Problem-Solving Strategy
Districts may use MAP Growth as a broad screening measure and obtain additional brief assessment information for students who meet locally established criteria.
A gated approach can reduce the number of students receiving additional assessment, but teams should recognize the tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity.
The purpose of the second gate is not simply to confirm that a student is “low.” It is to obtain information that helps clarify the instructional problem.
2. Analyze Errors When Accuracy Is Low
When a student demonstrates low ORF accuracy, examine the nature of the errors.
Consider:
What types of words are being read incorrectly?
Are errors concentrated in particular phonics patterns?
Is the student guessing?
Are errors related to multisyllabic words?
Are there consistent letter-sound or decoding patterns?
Does the student demonstrate similar difficulty on other decoding measures?
Is the student able to read the same patterns accurately in isolation?
Does the difficulty persist across different texts?
The goal is to identify what the student needs to learn, not simply to identify the student as a low reader.
3. Identify the Instructional Stage
Use available data to form a working hypothesis:
Acquisition: Performance is inaccurate or not yet reliably established.
Fluency: Accuracy is relatively adequate, but performance remains inefficient, slow, effortful, or inconsistent.
Generalization/Adaptation: Accuracy and fluency are relatively established, but the student has difficulty applying the skill across contexts or adapting it to new task demands.
The stage should be reconsidered as the student’s performance changes.
4. Select an Intervention That Matches the Stage
Acquisition/Mastery: Use structured routines that establish accurate responding through explicit instruction, modeling, guided practice, corrective feedback, and sufficient practice.
Example practice routine: Cover-Copy-Compare can provide structured practice for selected academic skills when the instructional goal involves accurate responding or retention. It should be selected because it fits the specific skill and instructional problem, not simply because a student is classified as being in Acquisition.
Fluency/Automaticity: Once accuracy is sufficiently established, shift instructional emphasis toward efficient and increasingly automatic performance.
Example practice routine: Taped Problems is a paced practice procedure that has been studied primarily for academic fact fluency. It can illustrate the broader principle of providing structured, appropriately paced practice to build automaticity. It should not be treated as a generic reading-fluency intervention.
Generalization/Adaptation: Provide opportunities to use established skills with different materials, formats, settings, and task demands while gradually reducing instructional support.
5. Adapt Intervention Without Losing Core Components
Interventions do not need to be delivered in an inflexible, one-size-fits-all manner.
Teams can adapt materials, examples, scheduling, or delivery methods to fit classroom conditions while preserving the critical instructional components of the intervention.
Adaptation should be intentional and documented when it is likely to affect the intervention’s essential components, dosage, or expected outcomes.
The question is not simply whether the intervention was delivered exactly as written. The question is whether the intervention was delivered with sufficient fidelity to reasonably expect the intended instructional effect.
6. Group Students Dynamically by Instructional Need
Flexible, skill-based grouping can be more instructionally useful than grouping students solely by overall screening score.
An intervention block might include:
Acquisition Group: Students needing explicit instruction to establish accurate performance.
Fluency Group: Students who demonstrate adequate accuracy but need greater efficiency or automaticity.
Generalization/Application Group: Students who demonstrate established skills but need to apply them across contexts or increasingly complex tasks.
Important Caveat: Grouping should remain flexible rather than static. Groups should be reviewed using progress-monitoring data. As students acquire accuracy, build automaticity, or demonstrate mastery, their instructional needs may change and their group placement should be reconsidered.
AVOIDING INTERVENTION MISMATCH
A low screening score does not automatically identify the intervention a student needs.
Mismatch 1: Low Accuracy -> Speeded Fluency Practice
Potential problem: The student has not established accurate performance. Increasing speed may result in practicing errors rather than establishing the underlying skill.
Better approach: Investigate the source of the accuracy problem and establish accurate responding before making speed the primary instructional target.
Mismatch 2: Adequate Accuracy + Low Rate -> Intensive Foundational Decoding
Potential problem: The intervention may emphasize a skill that is already relatively established rather than addressing the student’s primary need for efficiency or automaticity.
Better approach: Confirm accuracy with available data and consider instruction designed to develop efficient performance.
Mismatch 3: Adequate Accuracy + Adequate Rate -> Continued Basic Skill Instruction
Potential problem: The student’s difficulty may instead involve generalization, vocabulary, language comprehension, background knowledge, application, or another higher-level skill.
Better approach: Investigate the specific task or comprehension demands that are producing difficulty and match intervention accordingly.
THE MTSS DECISION-MAKING PRINCIPLE
The Instructional Hierarchy provides a practical framework for connecting assessment data to intervention design.
The purpose is not to place students permanently into Acquisition, Fluency, or Generalization/Adaptation categories. Instead, the hierarchy provides a problem-solving framework for determining:
What the student can currently do.
What the student cannot yet do.
What is most likely preventing successful performance.
What instruction is most likely to address that problem.
What progress-monitoring data will be used to determine whether the hypothesis was correct.
When intervention is not producing adequate growth, teams should examine both the intervention match and implementation.
Possible questions include:
Was the instructional problem correctly identified?
Was the intervention appropriately matched?
Was instruction delivered with sufficient intensity and exposure?
Were critical instructional components implemented?
Is the student receiving enough opportunities to respond?
Does progress-monitoring data suggest that the instructional hypothesis needs to change?
WHY THIS FRAMEWORK MATTERS FOR MTSS
It Makes Screening More Efficient: Using a broad screening measure followed by targeted assessment for students meeting locally established criteria can reduce unnecessary testing while providing additional information about students who may need support. However, districts should recognize that gated screening involves a tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity.
It Uses ORF Accuracy as Additional Evidence, Not a Diagnosis: Research supports grade-specific ORF accuracy criteria as potentially useful indicators of decoding difficulty in Grades 1–3. Burns et al. (2026) provides evidence for criteria in the approximate range of 83–94%, but these values should inform rather than replace professional problem solving.
It Bridges Assessment and Instruction: Instead of asking only "Which intervention should we use?", teams ask "What is preventing this student from performing the skill successfully?" The answer becomes the basis for selecting instruction.
It Reduces Intervention Mismatch: Students with different instructional problems may produce similarly low screening scores. A student with inaccurate decoding, a student with adequate accuracy but weak automaticity, and a student with adequate basic reading skills but poor comprehension may all obtain low overall reading scores. They should not automatically receive the same intervention.
KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR PROBLEM-SOLVING TEAMS
Determine the instructional problem before selecting the intervention.
Start with what the student can and cannot yet do.
Use the Instructional Hierarchy as a working instructional hypothesis, not a permanent student classification.
Accuracy is a primary concern during Acquisition. Establish reliable performance before making speed the primary instructional goal.
Fluency is more than simply going faster. The goal is accurate, efficient, increasingly automatic performance.
Generalization and Adaptation require application. Students need opportunities to use established skills across contexts and adapt them to new task demands.
A low MAP score alone is not enough to select an intervention.
For Grades 1–3, ORF accuracy can provide additional information about possible decoding difficulty, particularly when combined with error analysis and other assessment data.
Burns et al. (2026) supports grade-specific ORF accuracy criteria, but the reported percentages should not be treated as universal pass/fail or diagnostic cutoffs.
District MAP percentile criteria should be established based on the purpose of screening, local data, and available resources rather than presented as universally validated thresholds.
MAP goal areas should generate hypotheses rather than automatically determine intervention placement.
Group students according to instructional need when feasible, and revisit group membership as student performance changes.
When intervention is not producing adequate growth, reconsider both the instructional match and implementation.
The goal of MTSS is not simply to identify students who are low. The goal is to identify what they need to learn and provide instruction that addresses that need.
REFERENCES
Burns, M. K., Contesse, V. A., & Lane, H. B. (2026). Criteria for accurate oral reading to indicate difficulties with reading decoding. Reading & Writing Quarterly. Advance online publication.
Burns, M. K., Riley-Tillman, T. C., & VanDerHeyden, A. M. (2012). RTI applications, Volume 1: Academic and behavioral interventions. Guilford Press.
Haring, N. G., & Eaton, M. D. (1978). Systematic instructional procedures: An instructional hierarchy. In N. G. Haring, T. C. Lovitt, M. D. Eaton, & C. L. Hansen (Eds.), The fourth R: Research in the classroom (pp. 23–40). Charles E. Merrill.
Joseph, L. M., Konrad, M., Cates, G., Vajcner, T., Eveleigh, E., & Fishley, K. M. (2012). A meta-analytic review of the Cover-Copy-Compare and variations of this self-management procedure. Psychology in the Schools, 49(2), 122–136.
Klingbeil, D. A., Nelson, P. M., Van Norman, E. R., & Birr, C. R. (2017). Diagnostic accuracy of multivariate universal screening procedures for reading in upper elementary grades. Remedial and Special Education, 38(5), 308–320.
Konrad, M., & Joseph, L. M. (2014). Cover-Copy-Compare: A method for enhancing evidence-based instruction. Intervention in School and Clinic, 49(4), 203–210.
McCallum, E., Skinner, C. H., & Hutchins, H. (2004). The taped-problems intervention: Increasing division fact fluency using a low-tech self-managed time-delay intervention. Journal of Applied School Psychology, 20(2), 129–147.
Van Norman, E. R., Nelson, P. M., & Klingbeil, D. A. (2017). Single measure and gated screening approaches for identifying students at-risk for academic problems: Implications for sensitivity and specificity. School Psychology Quarterly, 32(3), 405–413.
VanDerHeyden, A. M., & Tilly, W. D. (2010). Keeping RTI on track: How to identify, repair, and prevent mistakes that derail implementation. LRP Publications.
Video examples of some selected interventions:
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