These four newsletters focus on issues related to adult basic education and the challenges faced when teaching adult learners. The first issue introduces the LDA (Learning Disabilities Association) Learning Center, a private, nonprofit agency intended to maximize the potential of all people with learning disabilities or related learning…

This document addresses issues in the identification of children with specific learning disability (SLD) in the context of reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). It first reviews current requirements in federal law, noting discrepancies in the regulations, then discusses several SLD identification approaches and…

This study was performed to determine whether graphic organizers or traditional methods were a more effective way of instructing and assessing vocabulary development. The traditional methods included instructing with the use of context clues and/or dictionary use, and assessing with the use of matching, cloze passages, and/or fill-ins. A group of…

This paper describes a series of preliminary and a double blind study on crossed visual laterality and reading difficulties in children. Preliminary studies investigated handedness, eye preference, and ear preference in a total of 196 third and fifth grade students. About 42 percent of the tested students were identified with the Monahan/DeYoung…

In 1992, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) first introduced autism as a federal disability category and mandated that states provide annual counts of children so identified. Since that time, the number of students identified with autism has grown significantly (U.S. Department of Education, 1994, 2002). Several states have…

A significant commitment of the National Research Center on Learning Disabilities (NRCLD) has been to work with school sites that are implementing responsiveness to intervention (RTI) models. The work with these schools began in November 2002 after the U.S. Department of Education requested that NRCLD identify, describe, and evaluate the…

Tests administered with accommodations to persons with disabilities have been considered nonequivalent to tests administered under standardized conditions to nondisabled test takers. This study examined the score change patterns for learning disabled students completing extended-time administrations of the SAT I: Reasoning Test in comparison to…

This study assesses 78 emotionally disturbed children on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) and the revised edition of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA) to demonstrate the relationship between the two tests and determine which revised ITPA subtest scores best predict the children's WISC Full Scale, Verbal and…

Ability to attend is considered in relation to mental retardation and learning disability. (Author)