Compare methods

	Single-Case Design in Education	Response to Intervention
Field	Education	Education
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2013	2006
Originator	Applied behavior analysis and special education (Baer, Wolf & Risley; Horner; Kratochwill)	Special education / school psychology field (Deno; Fuchs & Fuchs; Vaughn)
Type	Experimental design establishing intervention effects within individual cases via repeated measurement	Tiered framework for screening, intervention, and learning-disability identification
Seminal source	Kratochwill, T. R., Hitchcock, J. H., Horner, R. H., Levin, J. R., Odom, S. L., Rindskopf, D. M., & Shadish, W. R. (2013). Single-case intervention research design standards. Remedial and Special Education, 34(1), 26–38.	Fuchs, D., & Fuchs, L. S. (2006). Introduction to response to intervention: What, why, and how valid is it? Reading Research Quarterly, 41(1), 93–99.
Aliases	Single-Subject Design, Single-Case Experimental Design, SCED, N-of-1 Educational Design	RTI, RtI, Multi-Tiered System of Supports, MTSS
Related	4	4
Summary	Single-case experimental designs establish whether an intervention causes a change in behavior or learning by intensively studying individual cases over time rather than comparing groups. Each case serves as its own control: an outcome is measured repeatedly during a baseline phase and again under intervention, and the effect is demonstrated by replicating the change across phases or across cases. Central to special education and applied behavior analysis, and recognized by the What Works Clearinghouse and Horner and colleagues' standards, single-case design offers rigorous causal evidence when group experiments are impractical.	Response to intervention (RTI) is a multi-tiered framework for preventing academic failure and identifying students with learning disabilities by their responsiveness to high-quality instruction. All students are screened and taught with evidence-based core instruction; those who fall behind receive progressively more intensive intervention while their progress is closely monitored. Students who fail to respond even to intensive, well-implemented intervention are flagged as needing further evaluation. RTI reframes disability identification from a static test discrepancy to a dynamic question of who does not respond to good teaching.