Learning Disabilities Basics - Page 2

Karen Golembeski: Great. Thank you. We often get a lot of questions in the National Center for Learning Disabilities about how students with learning disabilities or LD are identified and could you shed a little bit more light on that? There’s been some controversy and we’d like to hear it from you.

Sheldon Horowitz: That’s a great question. Let me begin by saying that unlike many other disorders, there is no X-ray, there is no blood test, there is no quick and easy survey or questionnaire that can be used to confirm or rule out the presence of a learning disability. The process of how learning disabilities are identified is currently undergoing some really interesting changes and significant changes and these changes make it all the more important for there to be close communication between parents and schools. So let’s talk about what each of the models for identifying learning disabilities looks like.

The old model is where a student is having trouble in school. They’re referred for evaluation, usually by a teacher who speaks to a parent, the parent signs consent, and then the process of evaluation begins. A social history is taken, where someone in the school – sometimes a social worker, sometimes a psychologist, sometimes a special educator – collects relevant information, educational information about past experiences in school, when the struggle began, even family information about whether there are any medical issues that need to be considered, other members in the family who’ve had learning disabilities. Some educational testing is done that looks at reading and spelling and math and other kinds of important skills, and IQ testing that provides both an overall intellectual snapshot or cognitive snapshot of the child, and then some interpretation of scores in that series of tests – the IQ kinds of tests – that shed light on how the child processes information, how they listen, how they remember, how they retrieve information, how they organize information that’s presented in different ways. Looking at a profile of scores based on that kind of an evaluation – that was thought to be and is in some places still thought to be, proof that a learning disability is at play.

A new model for thinking about learning disabilities is now being implemented in lots of schools. [It’s] a little bit of a hybrid model, but it’s based on a bunch of different assumptions. It clearly doesn’t discount the importance of looking at specific skills, but it looks at this process of determining whether a learning disability is present from a very different perspective. The going-in assumption is that there’s nothing wrong with the child, and that the first place to look for a reason for the child’s struggle is in the general curriculum and in the teaching methods and strategies that were used. Not just at the point of referral but starting way, way back, much earlier in the child’s school career. This approach demands that before any testing takes place teachers try a number of different approaches to help a child learn. They collect data. That’s also referred to as progress monitoring. And in a very careful way they offer increasingly targeted and intensive instruction which is sometimes referred to as “differentiated instruction” across two or three tiers, or levels of intervention. During this process, general educators, special educators, other people who work in the school tap each other’s knowledge and creativity and they work as a team to see how they might accelerate the child’s learning. If the child is still not making progress, it’s at that point that a formal referral for special education testing is made. But that evaluation process of formally testing the child is immeasurably enhanced by all of the data that was collected about the student’s performance over time.

That process that I just described, which could involve a referral for special education testing, is known as multi-tiered system of interventions, or more commonly RTI, or response to intervention. The best place to look for more information about this model and how kids get evaluated in this new model is online at the RTI Action Network.

Karen Golembeski: Thank you. We received several questions from the field asking about executive functioning and executive processing. I was wondering if for our final question for this part of the series if you could tell us a little bit more about what does executive functioning and processing mean, and how do these terms relate to students with learning disabilities?

Sheldon Horowitz: Sure. Executive functioning. It’s a funny word to use when you’re talking about kids doing things in school, but executive functioning is a term that is used to describe things that we all do, and we do them all the time. They’re the kinds of skills and the kinds of behaviors that we tap that we use to get organized, to stay organized, to get things done. It’s what we do when we think about the day that’s ahead of us and we plan the steps that we need to take to get things accomplished. Executive functioning for example is very much dependent upon our ability to understand what’s expected of us or to remember the things that we need to tap or to use to succeed, even to change directions in midstream, to readjust what we’re doing and to go off in a different direction. So if you think about those kinds of behaviors, and you think about kids with learning disabilities, it’s clear and very easy to see how LD and executive function are intertwined.