Students with Learning Disabilities
Diagnosis is crucial and a thorough evaluation to narrow in
on the kind of learning disability and to which degree the disability is and
also where the child’s strengths and weaknesses are.
Identification early on is key!
Some issues regarding assessment are that there
is a lack of coordination and too many parties contributing with different
points of views, Such as teachers and specialists.
Components of Assessment:
Observation: What the student has been doing.
Collection of work and products
Discussions and Information obtained between
important parties
Testing
Currently there isn’t just one system on how to
identify learning disabilities.
When assessing a child personal judgment and
experience helps to diagnosis.
The two main processes when for assessment
are:
1. Screening
2. Psycho educational diagnosis which is based on
educational tests and
psychological test
Diagnosis can be very expensive
Effective Assessments Include:
1. Various
sources have been used; (such as teachers, parents, other professionals.)
2. If tests
have been used are they reliable, and is the administrator properly qualified
to be giving the tests?
3. Has the
assessment been altered to be subject’s culture, age, etc?
4. Was the
assessment ecological? Did it pertain to the subjects whole environment( Home,
school, classroom situation)
5. Does the
assessment recommend responses: ways of enrichment or remediation
6. Do
parties involved believe that the assessment best represents the subject?
Curriculum - Based Assessment:
Procedure that directly assesses student performance within the course content
for the purpose of finding out the students instructional needs.
Psychological Processing:
Diagnosing processing deficiencies. This process can’t be directly observed so
there is controversy over weather or not it can be properly diagnosed.
Information about areas like auditory, visual, motor skills and kinesthetic
functions are available.
Medical Intervention: medicine and learning
disabilities have been closely linked historically. Many have moved away from
medical model to a diagnostic and educational model for remediation.
Drug Therapy
Technical Aids: Such as computer programs which help
children who have troubles concentrating.
Also helps children who are
unorganized to become organized
Learning disabled children who
used a computer showed improvement in areas such as, reading, comprehension,
spelling and comprehension of words.
Educational: Concerns for educators who are teaching a
learning disabled child is how to set them up to succeed and how to design a
program that will benefit the child.
Services: Resource
Rooms. Controversy over whether or not to segregate learning disabled children
from the rest of the class?
- Most
educators want the learning disabled child to be kept in the regular classroom
with full time support.
- Great
reluctance to segregate learning disabled children from regular classrooms.
- Prefer to
have the students in the classroom with full time support.
- Some
research shows that inclusion can benefit academically, that learning disabled children who were included benefited academically.
- Inclusion
may benefit in certain subjects in school.
- On the
flip side studies and some educators found that children who were in classrooms
designed specifically for learning disabled succeeded better then in a general
classroom.
- Specific
classrooms help students who are learning disabled or who are emotionally
disturbed
- Inclusive
placements have not always led to positive outcomes. Children with mild
learning disabilities seem to be having the most problems with inclusion.
- Found
that when the children were included the outcome were “neither desirable nor
acceptable”.
- Even students in inclusive rooms with full
time support did not make significant academic progress.
- No
evidence that either inclusion or segregation meets the needs of all students.
