Investigated cognitive ability, academic achievement, and social-behavioral competencies of 80 students referred for academic problems, and relationship of these data to learning disability classification decisions. Forty subjects were classified as learning disabled, and 40 were not identified as handicapped. Variables found to correlate most…

Reviews evidence concerning Interagency Committee on Learning Disabilities's proposal to include social skills deficits as specific learning disability (LD). Proposes three hypotheses: causal, concomitant, and correlational. Found most support for correlational hypothesis, but proposes fourth, functional relationship hypothesis as most…

Discusses utility of individual ability measures for diagnostic and treatment decisions with children and youth who are referred in educational settings due to learning and/or behavior problems. Concludes that utility of current individual measures of ability in school psychology is low for diagnostic and treatment decisions. (Author/JDM)

This article commences with an excerpt from a memo entitled "Problems in Assessment of LD Children," recently found when the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) relocated their offices. The letter was written by then junior staffer Lou Danielson to a university professor. Although Danielson's letter was written in 1977, 27…

The Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA; 2004) permitted lack of students' response to intervention (RTI) to be considered as a basis for documenting specific learning disabilities (SLD). The previous method of detecting SLD, which relied on IQ and achievement testing, consequently is no longer mandatory.…

Three broad issues continue to dramatically impact the education of children with specific learning disabilities (SLD): (1) the development and implementation of scientifically defensible methods of identification; (2) the development and implementation of scientific interventions to ensure that children with SLD have access to and make progress…

Beginning in 1983 with the Connecticut Longitudinal Study (Shaywitz, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1992), with additions to the NICHD research program in 1987 (Lyon, 1996), educators were able to initiate new multidisciplinary prospective, longitudinal studies to define and classify LDs, to identify the multiple factors responsible for their presentation,…

The Responsiveness to Intervention (RI) model for diagnosing learning disabilities has been proposed as an alternative to previous definitions. Given the importance of reliable and valid assessment in the instructional process, assessment must be a crucial aspect of any RI approach. Curriculum-based measurement (CBM) has been discussed in previous…

We respond to the comments of Batsche, Kavale, and Kovaleski (this issue), on Response To Intervention (RTI) and learning disabilities. Historically, discrepancy between IQ and achievement has been used by many as a criterion for identification of learning disabilities. Recently, RTI is considered as a practice for identifying consistent and…

Many students have difficulty in educational and employment settings because they have failed to master basic writing skills. Multiple-baseline across-tasks designs were used to evaluate the effects of the Comprehensive Writing Program (CWP), a multicomponent intervention, on the writing performance of all students (n = 17) from 3 9th-grade…

This study investigated the relationships of healthy children with their handicapped siblings and analyzed their acceptance of the siblings. The study was conducted in 16 different special education and rehabilitation centers in Ankara. Two hundred twenty-eight healthy children between the ages of 10 to 17 years voluntarily participated in the…

Sample forms and form completion instructions are provided for the referral, initial placement, annual review, and reevaluation of exceptional children. The forms were developed for use by North Carolina local educational agencies. The forms encompass the exceptionalities of academically gifted, specific learning disabled, behaviorally-emotionally…

A national sample of 118 teachers of learning disabled (LD) students described their school districts' criteria for identifying LD students and indicated their agreement or disagreement with the criteria. Four basic categories of definitions were reflected in the categories provided by the 118 teachers: ability-achievement discrepancy, achievement…

Children with vestibular (inner ear) disorders and related postural disturbances constitute a large segment of the population described as learning disabled. (Author/DB)

Three-hundred kindergarten children were screened with a test battery in order to identify children at high-risk of experiencing learning disabilities. (Author/DB)