What If Progress Isn’t Moving? Why Some Students Don’t Respond to Intervention (and What to Do)

As educators, we’ve all had the experience of working with a student week after week… and the data just doesn’t move.

It’s frustrating. It’s disheartening. And if we’re not careful, it can feel like a reflection of us.

But honestly, when students aren’t making growth, it’s not a failure. It’s information. It’s our signal that something in the plan needs to shift.

So let’s look at what to do when the data shows little to no growth.

Let’s Meet Brianna (Case Study)

Brianna is a 4th grader with average cognitive ability. She has been receiving special education services since kindergarten and currently gets Tier 3 literacy intervention for 20 minutes each day, along with mental health supports. She is in the general education classroom for 87% of her day.

Despite years of intervention, her assessment data shows that she’s still performing far below grade level in core reading skills:

• Phonological Awareness: Unknown, because she’s in 4th grade, this assessment indicated “tested out”

• Phonics & Word Recognition: kindergarten level

• Vocabulary: kindergarten level

• Comprehension: kindergarten to early 1st grade level

• Writing: well below grade-level expectations

We can take a quick look at Brianna’s iReady Data…

On standardized testing, Brianna was scoring at or below the first percentile for the majority of her reading and writing skills. Her receptive vocabulary and oral comprehension were within the average range, but most of her other scores were significantly impacted, indicating that she was reading and writing at least 3 grade levels below grade-level.

Brianna had the following IEP goals:

• Phonics goal: Decode multisyllable words

• High-frequency “sight word” goal: Read 20 high-frequency sight words

• Phonics goal: Read short-vowel words using word patterns, word families, and common letter patterns.

• Morphology Goal: The spelling of a base word can change when adding suffixes (hop, hopping; hope, hoping).

On paper, she has several IEP goals around decoding, sight words, and morphology. But when we compare her goals with her assessment results, the picture doesn’t line up:

• Her goals target pieces of the puzzle (decoding multisyllabic words, sight words, suffix spelling).

• Her data shows broad deficits across all 5 Core Components of Literacy: phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

Why Progress isn’t Moving:

Looking at cases like Brianna’s, we often find a few common issues:

1. Not targeting the full scope of needs.

   Instruction zeroes in on one or two skills while ignoring others that are equally foundational.

2. Vague or hard-to-measure goals.
   A goal like “read 20 multisyllable words” leaves too many unanswered questions: Which patterns? Under what conditions? How much accuracy is expected?

3. Lack of clear metrics for success.

   Without specific targets and benchmarks, it’s impossible to know whether Brianna is truly on track or whether we’re kist creating goals to have goals.

Questions to Guide Next Steps

When progress isn’t moving, these are the questions we want to ask:

• Are we addressing the right skills? Does the intervention plan align with all five components of literacy, not just one?

• Are the goals measurable? Could another educator pick them up and know exactly how to measure success?

• Do we know what success looks like? Are we aiming for grade-level standards, or a smaller step toward closing the gap?

The Path Forward

When students appear “stuck,” here are three ways we can shift:

1. Use progress monitoring as your compass. Look for trends over time, not just one-off data points. If growth is flat, it’s a cue to try a different approach.

2. Align instruction with the Simple View of Reading. Ask: is this primarily a word recognition issue, a language comprehension issue, or both? This helps us avoid the trap of teaching only what feels familiar or comfortable.

3. Write clear, measurable goals. A strong goal might be: “The student will decode two-syllable words with vowel teams with at least 90% accuracy across three consecutive sessions.” Notice how this specifies the skill, condition, and metric for success.

When students don’t respond as expected, it’s easy to feel defeated. But stalled data doesn’t mean the student can’t learn, and it most certainly doesn’t mean you’re failing as an educator (although I will admit, I’ve felt that way in the past!).

It simply means the plan needs adjusting.

Progress monitoring gives us the proof we need to refine instruction, re-target goals, and help students move forward.

Students like Brianna don’t have to be “non-responders.” With clear goals, systematic instruction, and data-informed adjustments, they can, and do, make meaningful progress.