This field hearing of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions highlights the importance of early identification of students with dyslexia, how high-stakes testing affects such students, and the need for appropriate accommodations. Following the opening statement by Honorable Bill Cassidy (U.S. Senator from the State of Louisiana),…

Students with learning disabilities and other high-incidence hidden exceptionalities (HIHE) can struggle with secondary difficulties including low confidence in their abilities (e.g., Klassen, 2010) along with primary difficulties related to their exceptionality. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of the perspective of…

Efforts to diagnose students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) have increased in recent years in Turkey. However, the limited number of assessment tools used to identify students with SLD is one of the most important concerns in this area, since 8 out of 10 students with SLD have difficulty in reading, which affects other academic areas.…

This article examined the association between social position variables (i.e., Hispanic, health insurance coverage, and poverty rates) on the prevalence of specific learning disabilities (SLD) in students between 3 and 21 years of age. We used the 2012 to 2013 U.S. population data from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education…

Research priority setting makes knowledge users integral to the development of research agendas. The purpose of this study was to explore educational leaders' perspectives on research priorities in special education. A cross-sectional survey was conducted with leaders from 60 public school districts in British Columbia, Canada. Seventy-one…

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…

Processing Strengths and Weaknesses (PSW) models have been proposed as a method for identifying specific learning disabilities. Three PSW models were examined for their ability to predict expert identified specific learning disabilities cases. The Dual Discrepancy/Consistency Model (DD/C; Flanagan, Ortiz, & Alfonso, 2013) as operationalized by…

This review documents the learning disabilities (LD) identification criteria and procedures utilized in empirical research including students with LD published from 2001 to 2013 in three journals dedicated to the study of LD. Results reveal several troublesome findings related to transparency in reporting and the coherence of the LD construct.…

The purpose of this study was to explore Cypriot preschool teachers' and parents' perceptions and attitudes toward the value and contribution of the developed educational assessment instrument for the early identification and intervention for students at risk to present learning disabilities. In this research study, a qualitative research was used…

The main purpose of this research was to investigate empirically the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children -- the third Jordanian version (hereinafter WISC-III-Jordan) profiles to analyze cognitive factors for 'twice-exceptional' (2E) children characterizing 'mathematical giftedness with learning disabilities (MG/LDs). The paper examined…

Fundamental to the hypothesis-driven approach to assessing the special-education (SPED) needs of English learners (ELs) is the awareness that behaviors often exhibited by ELs may mirror indicators of learning disabilities (e.g., difficulty comprehending text, difficulty following directions, lack of appropriate classroom behavior, lack of…

Response to intervention (RTI) is increasingly being implemented in schools as a means to identify students with specific learning disabilities (SLD). Despite its wide use, there is limited research regarding school psychologists' graduate preparation in and familiarity with RTI for SLD identification. This study examined how school psychologists'…

Specific learning disabilities (SLD) identification has consistently been shown to be problematic; however, research has largely focused on SLD identification using test scores only. The present study, therefore, examined SLD identification decisions across identification methods and student evaluation data levels, including test scores,…

This study investigated the prevalence and stability of latent classes among elementary-aged English learning (EL) children whose first language is Spanish. To this end, EL children (N = 267) in Grades 1, 2, and 3 at Wave 1 (Year 1) were administered a battery of vocabulary, reading, math, and cognitive measures (short-term memory, working memory,…

It is estimated that ten percent of learners have some sort of learning disability; on average, this is two or three students per classroom (Butterworth and Kovas 2013). This means that, inevitably, all English language instructors will encounter students with learning disabilities in their classrooms and could encounter students with learning…