Distinguishing between students with and without learning disabilities: A comparative analysis of cognition, achievement, perceptual skills, behavior, and executive functioning

This study assesses 37 struggling students who have come through the Instructional Support Team process (with little success) in a relatively small, suburban school district and attempts to identify key assessment scores, behavior variables, and weaknesses that distinguish between those who do qualify as learning disabled students and those who do not. Obviously, one would expect typical achievement measures to be lower in LD versus non-LD samples (especially if identified through ability-achievement discrepancies), however, this study attempts to determine if other factors such as memory, auditory-perceptual skills, visual processing speed, visual-motor skills, verbal and nonverbal reasoning ability, academic fluency, attention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, emotional lability, executive functioning, social problems, anxiety, oppositional behavior, and other significant factors are more predictive and sensitive (and thus worthwhile measuring or screening) in distinguishing between these two groups of struggling students. This study addresses two important research questions: Are there significant differences in measures of struggling students with and without learning disabilities in the following areas: cognitive ability, achievement, perceptual skills, behavior, and executive functioning? Secondly, in viewing instruments that could be used in the screening process at the IST level (i.e., VMI, TAPS, WJ-III Fluency subtests, Conners', BRIEF), which assessment instruments, composites, indexes, or subtests are the most sensitive/predictive in distinguishing between struggling students with and without LD?; Results revealed significant differences between the two groups on measures of verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, auditory working memory, full scale IQ, word reading, pseudoword decoding, reading comprehension, numerical operations, math reasoning, spelling, written expression, listening comprehension, overall reading, overall math skills, overall written language skills, short-term auditory memory for numbers forward and reversed, auditory interpretation of directions, auditory word discrimination, auditory processing, overall auditory perceptual skills, anxiety/shyness, perfectionism, social problems, and emotional lability. Significant differences between the two groups were noted in cognitive ability, achievement, perceptual skills, and behavior. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...