The purpose of this study was to provide an in-depth investigation of the four lowest performing students in one kindergarten classroom. The students were provided with 10 weeks of explicit, intensive intervention in phonological awareness skills. Three types of data were collected during the intervention: fluency measures; strategy use to perform phonological awareness tasks; and students' number of responses during instruction. The combination of these data allowed both qualitative and quantitative examination of the characteristics of low-performing students. Low-performing students who were responsive to the intensive instruction differed on each of the aforementioned variables from students who were not responsive.