Schools conduct comprehensive psychoeducational evaluations to identify students with specific learning disabilities (SLDs) and determine whether they qualify for special education services. This decision-making process is complex and research has documented many factors influencing SLD identification decisions. One such factor may be…

The identification of specific learning disabilities (SLD) remains fraught with controversy and uncertainty about professionals' capacity to appropriately identify special education eligibility. For students from linguistically minoritized backgrounds, the "exclusionary clause" prohibits the identification of learning difficulties…

Learning disorders can have adverse impacts on children and families extending beyond the academic skills deficits. The goal of the present study was to assess the impact of the school's response, following an independent evaluation, for child and family school-related quality of life (QOL). We hypothesized that a positive school response would be…

Considerable attention and legislation are currently focused on developmental dyslexia. A major challenge to these efforts is how to define and operationalize dyslexia. In this article, we argue that rather than defining dyslexia on the basis of an underlying condition, dyslexia is best viewed as a label for an unexpected reading disability. This…

This article addresses the nature of dyslexia and best practices for identification and treatment within the context of multitier systems of support (MTSS). We initially review proposed definitions of dyslexia to identify key commonalities and differences in proposed attributes. We then review empirical evidence for proposed definitional…

Response to intervention (RTI) is a method for providing academic support to students and for identifying specific learning disabilities (SLDs). Using interrupted time series and hazard models, we examined if statewide RTI adoption in the U.S. state of Tennessee was associated with changes in rates of SLD and first-time SLD identification in…

Handwriting deficits, or dysgraphia, are present in several neurodevelopmental disorders. To investigate whether dysgraphia differs according to the associated disorder, we performed a detailed analysis of handwriting in a group of French children with developmental coordination disorders (DCD), reading disorder (RD), or comorbid RD and DCD.…

Some students may be diagnosed with a learning disability in mathematics or dyscalculia, whereas other students may demonstrate below-grade-level mathematics performance without a disability diagnosis. In the literature, researchers often identify students in both groups as experiencing math difficulty. To understand the performance of students…

How prevalent is dyslexia? A definitive answer to this question has been elusive because of the continuous distribution of reading performance and predictors of dyslexia and because of the heterogeneous nature of samples of poor readers. Samples of poor readers are a mixture of individuals whose reading is consistent with or expected based on…

We examined to what extent subgroups of students identified with learning disabilities (LDs; N = 630) in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998 to 1999 (ECLS-K): 1998 national longitudinal study displayed heterogeneity in longitudinal profiles of reading and mathematics achievement from first to eighth grades.…

In this study, we identified child- and family-level characteristics most strongly associated with clinical identification of language disorder for preschool-aged children. We used machine learning to identify variables that best classified children receiving therapy for language disorder among a sample of 483 3- to 5-year-old children (54%…

All but seven U.S. states have laws that govern some aspects of dyslexia screening, intervention, or teacher training in public schools. However, in the three states that mandate child-level reporting, data indicate lower than expected rates of dyslexia identification when compared with commonly accepted dyslexia prevalence rates. To better…

Response to intervention (RTI) has been promoted for nearly 20 years as a valid supplement to or alternative method of learning disability (LD) identification. Nevertheless, important unresolved questions remain about its role in disability identification. We had two purposes when conducting this study of 229 economically and racially diverse poor…

Increasing evidence suggests that children with developmental dyslexia exhibit a deficit not only at the segmental level of phonological processing but also, by extension, at the suprasegmental level. However, it remains unclear whether such a suprasegmental phonological processing deficit is due to a difficulty in processing acoustic cues of…

Developmental dyslexia is a lifelong impairment affecting 5% to 10% of the population. In French-speaking countries, although a number of standardized tests for dyslexia in children are available, tools suitable to screen for dyslexia in adults are lacking. In this study, we administered the "Alouette" reading test to a normative sample…