Raven's Guide to
Special Education
Evaluations - 2
Traditionally, school evaluation teams have focused on three factors in determining whether a student has a specific learning disability:
- oral expression
- listening comprehension
- written expression
- basic reading skills
- reading comprehension
- mathematics calculation
- mathematics reasoning
Environmental or economic disadvantage - Ongoing abuse, neglect, family instability, social isolation, malnutrition, lack of normal childhood opportunities, frequent substance
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IDEA's definition of SLD |
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A disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, which disorder may manifest itself in the imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or do mathematical calculations. The term includes such conditions as perceptual disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia. The term does not include a learning problem that is primarily the result of visual, hearing, or motor disabilities, of mental retardation, of emotional disturbance, or of environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage.
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abuse, student employment, family income at or below the poverty level
Health or medical problems - Long-term or chronic illnesses, medical syndromes, medications affecting learning, short-term illnesses that result in poor achievement
Personal adjustment - Situational stress correlated with a drop in achievement, difficulty adjusting to school expectations, attitudinal and motivational factors, delinquency, emotional instability
Educational disadvantage - Frequent changes in schools, lack of continuous school enrollment, frequent school absences, previous instructional deficiencies
Language factors - Language experience deprivation, multiple language background, poor language development
Cultural factors - Migrant farming, recent immigration from another country, cultural practices that are distinctly different from those of the majority culture, reservation life
Other handicapping conditions - Mental retardation, sensory impairment, motor impairment, emotional disturbance, a behavior disorder
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 no longer requires schools to use the the IQ-achievement discrepancy model to determine specific learning disability eligibility. Evaluation teams may instead use a process to determine whether the child responds to scientific, research- based intervention as part of the evaluation procedures.
The definition of "child with a disability" in the regulations for IDEA includes attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as conditions that could render a student eligible for special education services under the "other health impairment" (OHI) category.
The IDEA regulations also clarify that the term "limited strength, vitality, or alertness" in the definition of OHI (when applied to students with ADD or ADHD) includes "a child's heightened alertness to environmental stimuli that results in limited alertness with respect to the educational environment."
All students with ADD or ADHD clearly are not eligible to receive special education and related services, just as all students who have one or more of the other conditions listed under the "other health impairment" category are not necessarily eligible (e.g., children with a heart condition, asthma, diabetes, and rheumatic fever).
To be eligible, a student with ADD or ADHD (as with all other students being considered for special education) must:
Have a condition that meets one of the special education disability categories, and
Need special education and related services because of that disability.
Some students with ADD or ADHD may be eligible under other disability categories if they meet the criteria for those disabilities, while other students may not be eligible, but might qualify under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.