Synthesis of Research Symposium at Cld's 24th International Conference on Learning Disabilities: “Must Reads” for 2009

Abstract

The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before. Thorstein Veblen Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. Zora Neale Hurston The trouble with research is that it tells you what people were thinking about yesterday, not tomorrow. It's like driving a car using a rearview mirror. Bernard Loomis Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. Carl Sagan Marcus Garvey, the noted creator of the Back to Africa movement in the United States, is reported to have said, A people without knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots. In learning disabilities (LD), our history is found, in large part, on the pages of our journals. Throughout our professional lifetime, we spend countless hours either reading published articles to stay abreast of the latest developments in LD or looking at accumulated stacks of journals and thinking that some day we'll plow through the articles to catch up. Within the pages of our journals, we find information about the latest tests or interventions that have been used with success (e.g., studies exploring the validity of test scores for a certain population, introduction and examination of a particular reading program), opinion pieces that argue for or against a particular topic of interest to the field (e.g., discussions about Response to Intervention, debates on whether intelligence tests have any role in LD diagnosis), and events that have shaped the field (e.g., conference proceedings, LD Summit summaries). All of the articles in our periodicals contribute to our history, while often calling upon history to provide a backdrop and/or rationale for the main thesis of what is being published. For several years, the Research Committee of the Council for Learning Disabilities (CLD) has sponsored a session at its annual conference where committee members have shared their Must Reads, articles that have appeared in the literature within the previous year that they deemed particularly noteworthy. The rationale for such a session for busy professionals was summed up several years ago by David Scanlon and his colleagues (Scanlon, Boudah, Elksnin, Gersten, & Klingner, 2004), who noted, Despite the fact that busy readers can barely sample all that is published, professional publications are a primary means for communicating research, theory, and policy within the profession. Keeping up is a challenge (p. 215). The purpose of the conference session, and this article, is to provide one answer to that daunting challenge by reviewing a few of the noteworthy articles that had recently appeared in print that may have been missed or forgotten, but that warrant attention. In 2009, the chairs of the Research Committee were asked by the CLD conference program chair to once again sponsor a Must Reads session. The committee chairs subsequently contacted members of their committee to identify who would be willing to participate in the session as panel members. Once identified, the participants were asked to (a) identify three articles that they had found particularly enlightening in the past year, (b) present these articles with commentary to the session attendees, and (c) contribute their session commentary in writing for an article that would be submitted for possible publication in the organization's journal, the Learning Disability Quarterly. In October 2009, CLD's Research Committee members presented their Must Reads in Dallas, Texas, at the organization's 31st annual International Conference on Learning Disabilities. In this article, the presenters summarize a few of their selected articles and state why each article to them is a Must Read. It comes as little surprise that the chosen articles address research in which each presenter is involved. For example, Diane Bryant's articles focus on mathematics, Janette Klingner's articles focus on literacy issues, and Dan Boudah's articles deal with professional development. …