Construct Of Learning Disabilities Research Articles

Constructing identities of disability in narratives about high school

This article examines how autistic youth and youth with learning disabilities (LD) discursively position themselves within narratives telling of their high school experiences to construct identities of disability. Analysis of the narrative episodes of 12 participants revealed advocacy and associated traits of disability as two superordinate themes reflective of recounted experiences of disability. A microanalysis examined narratives at three levels, in accordance with Bamberg's model of positioning. Participants position themselves within, and outside of their narratives to mark themselves as protagonists in relation to school professionals, index levels of agency in achieving goals in high school, and near or distance themselves from certain behaviors and characteristics associated with membership to their disability – all to construct identities related to disability. Describing how autistic youth and youth with LD construct identities related to disability advances understanding within research as to how these marginalized groups build their relationships to disability.

Neurodevelopmental difficulties as a comprehensive construct of learning disabilities in children with developmental delay: a systematic review

espanolUn numero considerable de estudiantes presenta dificultades de aprendizaje y bajo rendimiento academico, sin embargo su evaluacion no siempre deriva en un diagnostico concreto. Son categorizados como inmaduros, pero no se determinan ni la naturaleza ni las caracteristicas de sus dificultades. El objetivo de este estudio fue identificar los dominios evolutivos afectados en ninos con retraso del desarrollo (RD) con la finalidad de valorar el concepto de dificultades neuroevolutivas como categoria comprensiva y perfil de las dificultades generalizadas de aprendizaje. Para ello, se realizo una revision sistematica en las bases electronicas Medline, PsycINFO, WOS, Eric, Dialnet y CSIC y, tras aplicar los criterios de inclusion, se seleccionaron 18 articulos. Los resultados confirman que RD se utiliza como etiqueta diagnostica para caracterizar a ninos con retrasos significativos en uno o varios ambitos del desarrollo, pero no existe una definicion de consenso ni criterios especificos para su diagnostico, y solo seria de aplicacion a ninos de corta edad. Los dominios afectados coinciden con funciones neuroevolutivas y, en su etiologia, destacan factores de riesgo biologico y ambiental. Las dificultades neuroevolutivas abarcarian un amplio espectro de deficits con distintos niveles de gravedad que, al interactuar entre si, dan lugar a una variedad de perfiles. EnglishA considerable number of students have learning difficulties and low academic performance, yet their evaluation does not always lead to a concrete diagnosis. They are categorized as immature, but neither the nature nor the characteristics of their difficulties are determined. The aim of this study was to identify the developmental domains which are affected in children with developmental delay (DD) in order to assess the concept of neurodevelopmental difficulties as a comprehensive category and profile of generalized learning difficulties. To this end, a systematic review was carried out on the electronic databases Medline, PsycINFO, WOS, Eric, Dialnet and CSIC and, after applying the inclusion criteria, 18 articles were selected. The results confirm that DD is used as a diagnostic label to characterize children with significant delays in one or more developmental domains, but there is no definition of consensus nor specific criteria for its diagnosis, and it would only be applicable to young children. The affected domains coincide with neurodevelopmental functions, and biological and environmental risk factors stand out in their aetiology. Neurodevelopmental difficulties would encompass a wide spectrum of deficits with different levels of severity that, on interacting with each other, give rise to a variety of profiles.

Learning Disability Identification Criteria and Reporting in Empirical Research: A Review of 2001–2013

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. Nearly one‐third of all empirical studies investigating LD did not describe who identified the participants as having LD or how they were identified. Information on the specific area of LD was similarly lacking. Across studies, identification criteria varied widely. Moving forward, we contend that greater transparency and consistency with regard to the definition and operationalization of the construct of LD in empirical research is necessary if solidification of the scientific construct of LD is to be achieved.

'Learning disabilities' as a 'black box': on the different conceptions and constructions of a popular clinical entity in Israel.

This article aims to stimulate new thinking about learning disabilities than is customary in local literature. Previous educational and psychological studies concerning learning disabilities regarded them as if they were objective categories with formal definitions and criteria accepted in scholarly literature. Contrary to that, this article explores the various conceptions, constructions, and meanings of learning disabilities that comprise the narrative descriptions and explanations of didactic diagnosticians. For this purpose, 50 in-depth interviews were conducted. There are four sections. Part One lays out the theoretical and methodological background of the sociological and discursive debate about learning disabilities. Part Two explores the various main thematic aspects and narrative strategies that were used by the diagnosticians in their construction of their purportedly 'objective', 'a-historical', 'a-political' experts' narrative. The third part reveals the polyphonic multifaceted nature of the learning disabilities construct. The experts' narrative undermines the objective and homogeneous definitions in the literature by uncovering learning disabilities' heterogeneous meaning repertoire. This repertoire consists, among others, of conceptualizing disability as a 'disease', a 'symptom', a 'genetic defect', a 'disorder', an 'educational difficulty', a 'variance', and even a 'gift'. This part also reveals the experts' narrative reaction strategies to the aforementioned polyphonic spectacle. It is revealed that the interviewees' narrative deconstructs the 'scientific factual nature' of the clinical categories. The fourth part highlights a central paradox in the expert narrative: The tension between the narrative stigmatic-labeling aspects and the destigmatic-'liberating' aspects. The claim is made that this tension can partly explain the current popularity of the LD diagnosis. This article is the third in a series of papers that seeks to contribute to the creation of a more nuanced disability discourse by exposing its shaky scientific foundations.

Revisiting Discrepancy Theory in Learning Disabilities: What Went Wrong and Why We Should Go Back

The rise in popularity of Response to Intervention (RTI) as a method of identifying Learning Disabilities (LD) is partially due to the psychometric and theoretical issues inherent to the use of IQ tests in the once popular discrepancy method of identification. However, both RTI and discrepancy theories have their shortcomings, and criticisms directed at either method are usually applicable to both. This conceptual article puts forward a justification for using tests of the cognitive processes that are implicated in LD as a better method of LD identification. Although the unsuitability of the discrepancy method to accurately identify LD students is well established, it does represent the construct of LD well. Therefore, the discrepancy method can be used as an effective baseline measure against which improved identification procedures based on cognitive processes can be measured. Once these cognitive processes are more clearly defined, tests of these processes offer promise for LD identification.

“Truly Disabled?”

The construct of learning disabilities has been challenged pedagogically, politically, and in the judiciary. Some claim that learning disabilities are socially constructed and created by misdirected efforts of educational reform. Politicians worry about the growing number of children served in special education and propose that many LD students are instructional casualties and not truly disabled. The judiciary has applied a severity screen that narrows the class of eligible children and has contributed to the LD eligibility confusion. This article traces the legislative history of LD eligibility, reviews administrative and judicial decisions pertaining to LD eligibility, and explores the dilemma inherent in a rights-based approach to ensuring equitable educational opportunity for students with LD.

Learning From Samuel A. Kirk's 16 Versions of Learning Disability: A Rejoinder to Mather and Morris

In 2004, when I first started to investigate the history of the learning disability construct, I quickly found that the available literature on the topic fell into two categories, valid historical scholarship and celebrationist narratives. There were a small number of serious historical works by Carrier (1983, 1986, 1987) and Franklin (1987, 1994), who examined the growth of the learning disability diagnosis as a political and scientific development over many decades. I framed my own research in the tradition of Franklin (1987, 1994) and Carrier (1983, 1986, 1987), upholding the standards of research methodology and critical analysis set by historians (e.g., Danto, 2008; McDowell, 2002). My goal has been to determine where this notion of learning disability came from and how it grew in the work of many scientists over time. I have assumed neither that learning disability is a correct way of understanding the learning difficulties of some children nor that this construct was built as some sort of farce. I view the construct as a historical product, an idea cultivated through scientific practices and theories over generations of research. My research efforts resulted in a book entitled The Incomplete Child: An Intellectual History of Learning Disabilities that chronicled the scientific ideas and practices that brought about the learning disability construct (Danforth, 2009). It is a story of multiple lines of intellectual traditions conflicting and melding, of pre-WWII German holistic science blending with Chicago School functionalism and the environmentalism of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station. In addition, I have written a recent series of articles, including the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities piece that I co-authored with Laura Slocum and Jennifer Dunkle. In these historical articles I addressed topics ranging from the pronounced social class bias of learning disability researchers of the 1960s and 1970s (Danforth, in press, a) to the 1970s epistemological shift toward objectivism (Danforth, in press, b). The Mather and Morris (2011) response paper belongs to the celebrationist category of historical writing that does not meet the standards of methodological rigor and critical analysis set by professional historians. This paper continues a professional line of insider accounts, self-congratulatory, poorly researched historical overviews written by special educators that celebrate the field and its pioneers (e.g., Cruickshank & Hallahan, 1981; Hallahan & Mercer, n.d.; Hallahan & Mock, 2003; Wiederholt, 1974). These works, although often informative, are overwhelmingly acritical. The authors fail to ask serious and troubling questions about the development of the field and the social impact of the ideas in the field. The purposes and the work in the field are lauded without the kind of rigorous scrutiny that historians apply to their subject matter. In their paper Mather and Morris’s (2011) attempt to preserve ‘‘the legacy that Dr. Samuel A. Kirk left behind’’ (p. 118). Their primary goal is to perpetuate a purified narrative of a man living, thinking, and acting without contradictions and errors, without moral uncertainty and fallibility. The truth of the matter is that Sam Kirk was far from clear and definitive in his handling of the learning disability construct. In fact, he articulated 16 substantively different versions of the learning disability construct. I devote an entire chapter in my 2009 book to this issue. In this short rejoinder, I briefly illuminate Kirk’s multiple contradictory articulations of the concept of learning disability between 1960 and 1984. Then I probe for possible lessons we might draw from Kirk’s inconsistencies.

What Samuel A. Kirk Really Said About Mental Retardation and Learning Disabilities: A Response to Danforth, Slocum, and Dunkle

What Samuel A. Kirk Really Said About Mental Retardation and Learning Disabilities: A Response to Danforth, Slocum, and Dunkle

Romantic Agrarianism and Movement Education in the United States: Examining the discursive politics of learning disability science

The learning disability construct gained scientific and political legitimacy in the United States in the 1960s as an explanation for some forms of childhood learning difficulties. In 1975, federal law incorporated learning disability into the categorical system of special education. The historical and scientific roots of the disorder involved a neuropsychological discourse that often conflated lower social class identity and learning disability. Lower class, often urban, families were viewed as providing insufficient intellectual stimulation for their young children, thereby causing learning problems. This paper undertakes a historical analysis of a particular form of this class‐based political discourse—romantic agrarianism—developed by leading learning disability researchers Newell Kephart and Marianne Frostig in the 1960s.

Turning the Educability Narrative: Samuel A. Kirk at the Intersection of Learning Disability and “Mental Retardation”

It is often assumed that current disability constructs exist in conceptual isolation from one another. This article explores the tangled historical relationship between "mental retardation" and learning disability in the writings and speeches of special education pioneer Samuel A. Kirk. Beginning in the 1950s, Kirk repeatedly told an educability narrative that described children with low IQ scores as capable students worthy of instruction. However, when he tried to clearly distinguish between the new learning disability construct and the older mental retardation, Kirk altered his standard tale. True intellectual potential then shifted to the learning disability, leaving mental retardation doubly stigmatized as the disorder of educational infertility.

The incomplete child: an intellectual history of learning disabilities

With the passage of Public Law 94-142 in 1975, the learning disability construct gained national legitimacy. Feeding that political achievement, behind the very idea of a learning disability, was the development of a science that blended neurology, psychology, and education. This book tracks the historical creation of the science of learning disabilities, beginning with the clinical research with brain-injured World War I soldiers conducted by German physician Kurt Goldstein. It traces the growth of the two primary research traditions, the psycholinguistic theory of Samuel Kirk and the movement education of Newell Kephart, exploring how specific scientific orientations, theories, and practices led to the birth of the learning disability in the United States.

On the Irrelevance of Intelligence in Predicting Responsiveness to Reading Instruction

There is increasingly negative sentiment against IQ-achievement discrepancy as a method to identify children with learning disabilities (LD) and, more broadly, intelligence as an explanation of poor academic performance. The evidence for this latter view was examined by reviewing 13 studies involving 1,542 children who were at risk or reading disabled to determine whether IQ predicted responsiveness to reading intervention. In 8 of the 13 studies, it accounted for unique variance. It was a stronger and more consistent predictor among older students in interventions designed to strengthen reading comprehension; a weaker and less consistent predictor among younger children in phonological awareness training. Implications are discussed for the identification and treatment of students with LD and the LD construct.

Validity of Alternative Approaches for the Identification of Learning Disabilities

This article reviews the validity of models based on (a) aptitude-achievement discrepancies, (b) low achievement, (c) intraindividual differences, and (d) response to instruction for the classification and identification of learning disabilities (LD). Models based on aptitude-achievement discrepancies and intraindividual differences showed little evidence of discriminant validity. Low achievement models had stronger discriminant validity but do not adequately assess the most significant component of the LD construct, unexpected underachievement. All three of these status models have limited reliability because of their reliance on a measurement at a single time point. Models that incorporate response to instruction have stronger reliability and validity but cannot represent the sole criterion for LD identification. Hybrid models combining low achievement and response to instruction most clearly capture the LD construct and have the most direct relation to instruction. The assessment of students for LD must reflect a stronger underlying classification that takes into account relations with other developmental disorders as well as the reliability and validity of the underlying classification and resultant identification system.

Why Scientific Research must Guide Educational Policy and Instructional Practices in Learning Disabilities

SOME BACKGROUND When I initiated my research program in the neuropsychology of learning disabilities (LDs) in 1974, I was guided in part by the scholarship of William Cruickshank, Helmer Myklebust, Doris Johnson, and Samuel Kirk, among others. These gifted pioneers made an indelible impact on my thinking and my research over the years. I found compelling their clinical insights about children who had significant reading problems (and other academic problems) despite robust intellectual capability, since I worked with many such children as a psychologist in the public schools. I also learned a great deal from them about the instructional skills that teachers must possess in order to address individual differences in learning. I was particularly fascinated by this concept of unexpected underachievement and the paradox of learning difficulties in an intellectually competent student. Misguided Assumptions As I became interested in this concept of unexpected underachievement, I was struck by the heterogeneity of reading difficulties that I observed in schools. When I began my research career, I focused on this heterogeneity and asked whether children identified with LDs in reading could be assigned to more homogeneous subtypes, with each subtype described by different reading-related deficits. My goal, if I found subtypes, was to then identify and validate subtype-by-treatment interactions. Unfortunately, my search for valid subtypes and interactions with different treatments was unsuccessful for several reasons. Fundamentally, my work was based on scientifically untested assumptions underlying the construct of LDs: I assumed that the definition of LDs at that time was valid and I assumed that LDs was a distinct category of disability that could be differentiated empirically from other categories through psychometric (e.g., IQ-achievement discrepancies) and exclusionary criteria. I was wrong on both counts, but I figured I might not be alone in making these assumptions. At the same time, it was clear to me that the field had made significant contributions by bringing special education services to students with LDs--services that had previously been denied. By 1969, parental and professional advocacy resulted in federal recognition of LDs and access to due process to ensure a free and appropriate public education. However, it troubled me that federal policy may have been based on the same flawed assumptions that I had made. While I did not have any doubts that LDs constituted a genuine category of exceptionality, I came to realize that the definition of LDs, instantiated in federal legislation, was based upon clinical observations and anecdotal evidence rather than replicated scientific evidence. Lessons Learned To make myself feel better I could make the excuse that my faulty assumptions were based on the knowledge of LDs available at the time. But that doesn't cut it. In hindsight, I should have broadened my view of LDs beyond the literature specific to the field and my training (experimental and physiological psychology, learning disabilities), and turned to the literatures in the developmental, cognitive, linguistic, psychometric and classification sciences as well. When I eventually did examine these sources in depth, I learned a great deal about individual differences, principles of classification, continuous distributions, the vagaries of establishing cut points along the normal distribution, and the fact that there were significant problems with the notion that IQ scores are valid predictors of learning potential. I learned that a comparison of IQ scores with achievement scores to derive a discrepancy as a marker for LDs is fraught with psychometric, statistical, and conceptual problems that render the putative relationship between the scores unreliable and meaningless (see Steubing et al., 2002, for a review of these issues). In addition, I learned that using a discrepancy metric in the identification of LDs may harm children more than it helps, not only because criteria are inconsistent across states and schools, but also because a discrepancy typically requires failure to occur (i. …

After the Demise of the Discrepancy: Proposed Learning Disabilities Diagnostic Criteria.

Pending legislation and positions taken by the U.S. Department of Education may radically alter current learning disabilities (LD) definitions and diagnostic approaches. Proposals include eliminating a discrepancy model and incorporating a more comprehensive approach to LD assessment but one based on more subjective clinical judgment. Although this effort to change is laudable, it does not address the residual problems that will continue to plague the field: the lack of specificity of the construct of LD and the inconsistent and idiosyncratic approach to diagnosis taken by practitioners and researchers across and within states. This article proposes a new LD classification model that transcends educational and psychiatric systems of diagnosis, calls for a uniform and national diagnostic system, and suggests renaming the disorder (e.g., developmental learning delay).

A Reconceptualization of Learning Disabilities via a Self-Organizing Systems Paradigm

A dilemma exists regarding the interpretation of learning disabilities. A self-organizing systems (SOS) paradigm suggests widespread, diffuse outcomes, whereas a specific learning disability concept suggests more localized dysfunction. There may be very good reason to doubt the veridicality of the concept of a specific learning disability, not because the construct of learning disabilities itself is a frivolous concept, as some have held, but because the biological or neurological events that underlie a learning disability do not remain focal and constrained only to specific dysfunction. It is important to know whether an identified learning disability remains contained or whether processing disorders might be found in other areas. The assessment profiles of school-age children identified with nonverbal learning disabilities (NLD), assumed to have primarily right-hemispheric brain dysfunctions, and children with language-based learning disabilities (LLD), assumed to have primarily left-hemispheric brain dysfunctions, were examined to explore learning disabilities using an SOS paradigm. The pilot study reported here is used as an exemplar of how a self-organizing systems paradigm is conceptualized. Although a more comprehensive study is needed to confirm the data, this exemplar suggests that overflow into areas not typically associated with each disability subtype may occur. Concerns regarding ways of determining discrepancy for diagnostic purposes are noted, and remediation strategies designed for specific disabilities are questioned.

Respecting the Importance of Science and Practice: A Pragmatic View

Kavale and Forness set out to explain why the LD field lacks integrity. They say Hinshelwood's study of congenital word-blindness (p. 258) and Strauss and Werner's research on brain injury (p. 251) represented an important start on building a foundation for a credible profession. But these scientific efforts came to a standstill when parents and practitioners took over, leaving the field in an arrested state of development. Without a fully developed, legitimate construct of learning disabilities, say Kavale and Forness, the field became a partial vacuum into which rushed the illogical and irrational forces of politics-specifically, narrow-minded advocacy, Marxist ideology, and anti-Newtonian philosophy that often conflicted with and undermined the LD field's auspicious beginnings. The most prominent manifestation of politics in the LD field, we're told, is advocacy, which is described by Kavale and Forness as quintessentially liberal in motive. It is captured for the authors in the notion of entitlements, which may be illustrated by the simple formula: more students produce more dollars for more programs and teachers. Ironically, this point is also made by Wang and Walberg (1988), outspoken critics of special education in general and the LD field in particular. Such thinking, according to Kavale and Forness, inadvertently subverted the field's in two ways: (a) by failing to support continued funding of the scientific study of LD and (b) by arguing for more service, rather than greater understanding. Advocacy, write Kavale and Forness, has changed the parameters of LD to include a new class of student with low intelligence. In doing so, [it] contorted [LD's] basic character and undermined its scientific integrity (p. 251). Kavale and Fomess's solution: More money for the scientific understanding of the biophysical mechanisms responsible for LD. Below we take issue with Kavale and Forness's

A Critical Analysis of Siegel's Case for Revision of the Learning Disability Construct

In this paper I analyse Siegel's revisionist conceptualization of the learning disability concept. Siegel has attempted to demonstrate that the construct of learning disabilities is flawed because of its long‐term linkage with the variable of intelligence. The discrepancy formulation is the particular focus of her criticism. She has denigrated the use of IQ tests in LD diagnosis and argued that intelligence and reading measure many of the same abilities and therefore any difference between these two functions is confounded; that IQ is not a valid measure of reading potential in children with LD and normal populations; and that logical analysis and empirical research demonstrate that the concept of intelligence is redundant in any conception of learning disabilities. I present arguments against each of these propositions and several other matters raised in her paper. I propose two basic approaches to learning disabilities and give expression to these in two theoretical models, a simple categorical model (d...

Operational Definitions and Learning Disabilities: An Overview

In 1981, the National Joint Committee for Learning Disabilities (NJCLD) adopted the following definition: Learning disabilities is a generic term that refers to a heterogeneous group of disorders manifested by significant difficulties in the acquisition and use of listening, speaking, reading, writing, reasoning, or mathematical abilities. These disorders are intrinsic to the individual and are presumed to be due to central nervous system dysfunction. Even though a learning disability may occur concomitantly with other handicapping conditions (e.g., sensory impairment, mental retardation, social, or emotional disturbance) or environmental influences (e.g., cultural differences, insufficient/inappropriate instruction, psychogenic factors), it is not the direct result of these conditions or influences. (Hammill, Leigh, McNutt, & Larsen, 1981, p. 336) This definition has been evaluated positively compared to others (e.g., Interagency Committee on Learning Disabilities, 1987; U.S.O.E., 1977; e.g., see Hammill, 1990; Silver, 1988). However, it is not an operational definition, because it does not specify the operations or procedures by which the construct of learning disabilities can be recognized and measured. For example, it is unlikely that current studies on learning disabilities would be published in refereed research journals if their subject sample description relied solely on the NJCLD definition. Therefore, if we are to enhance our understanding of learning disabilities, serious consideration must be given to the selection of parameters that go into an operational definition. It is in this spirit that this special issue of the Learning Disability Quarterly was developed. In this opening discussion, I seek to distill some ideas that unify what otherwise might appear to be a collection of unintegrated articles. The reader should remember, however, that each article is written from the authors' own research perspective. I deliberately solicited articles of diverse research perspectives to allow a number of issues to be considered. For example, in the first article Kavale, Forness, and Lorsbach discuss the limitations of operational definitions, whereas the article by Stanovich focuses on the irrelevancy of IQ. Likewise, Hynd, Marshall, and Gonzalez emphasize the relevance of studies originating from neuropsychology, Reynolds' article targets psychometric models, while Bryan considers primarily social cognition. No doubt, to integrate these diverse perspectives will be no small feat. The purpose of this special issue, however, is not to show or seek unanimity among the contributors on how to operationalize learning disabilities. Rather, the focus is on the commonality of conceptual issues that emerges in our attempts to operationalize learning disabilities.

An Investigation of the Learning Disability Construct by the JAN Technique

Profiles of 25 possible learning disabilities (LD) cases were constructed. Thirty-four North Dakota LD specialists served as raters making a diagnostic decision. A judgment analysis was performed on the decisions of the 34 raters, and one major judgmental policy and one minor policy were found to be operating among the raters. These judgmental policies, it was argued, represented the construct of learning disabilities for the respective groups.