Learning Disability Quarterly

Last October the Division for Children with Learning Disabilities held its first national convention. To say the event was stimulating is an understatement. For the first time in the history of DCLD, state and national officers sat together and dealt with issue after issue for an entire day. Meeting halls and Informal sessions were overcrowded and attendance quadrupled the expected 500 persons. Congruent with the tenor of the event, Dr. Donald Hammill presented his keynote address that captured perfectly the spirit of the three-day convention. Dr. Hammill was kind enough to donate to DCLD the keynote presentation as well as the funds from the over 400 tapes sold to date. In response to our request, he has also been generous enough to transcribe the tapes and thus allow the LDQ the opportunity to make the speech available to all DCLD members and LDQ subscribers. The title and the speech say the rest … M.S.P.

This study investigated role-taking skills in normal achieving and learning disabled children. The children looked at three cartoon series, in each of which a main character was portrayed as being caught up in a chain of events resulting in respective states of anger or fear or sadness. Additionally, in each of them, a bystander was introduced who witnessed the main character's psychological state without the knowledge of the prior context of the events. Each child told the stories from the viewpoints of the main characters and of the bystanders. Only the bystanders' stories were scored for egocentrism. The extent to which subjects could take a perspective which was unclouded by contextual knowledge known only to themselves was thus measured. The results showed that learning disabled children were much less able to adopt an alternative viewpoint than their normal counterparts. Moreover, within the group of learning disabled children, females were substantially more egocentric than males. The results enhanced understanding of previous findings of social problems in learning disabled children, and underscored the need for training learning disabled children in social skills.

Learning disabled and nondisabled children were videotaped while being administered a standardized interview by a young adult female. Half of the children in each group received instructions to ingratiate themselves with the interviewer, while the remaining children were told to “act naturally”. The videotapes were subsequently used in three experiments in which the nature of the observers was varied. College students, mothers, and children served as observers and were asked to rate the videotaped child on a variety of items. Videotapes were presented without sound such that the ratings were based on nonverbal behaviors. In general, it was found that observers judged learning disabled children more harshly than nondisabled youngsters.

This article discusses the DCLD Code of Ethics and Competencies for Teachers of Learning Disabled Children and Youth and reviews each of its stated purposes related to: teacher training programs, certification standards, employment criteria, and monitoring of ongoing professional practices. Recommendations are made for practical implementation of the competency statements. While some of the recommendations pertain to applications in the future, the discussion emphasizes the need to implement the DCLD competencies as soon as possible. Even though the philosophical and theoretical debates regarding learning disabilities will not be resolved by the DCLD document, implementation of the competency standards will lead to significant improvement of services to children with learning disabilities.

This study evaluates two kindergarten predictive instruments by following the same population over one, two, three, and four years using multiple-regression analysis. The Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests: Readiness Skills (1968) and the Teacher Estimate of Kindergarten Pupils' Abilities (Kirk, 1966) were used as predictor variables. The criterion variables consisted of the vocabulary and comprehension test scores from the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests Primary, A, B, C, and Survey D administered one, two, three, and four years later. The analyses show exactly which subtests on the reading readiness tests and exactly which areas of the kindergarten teacher rating scale were predictive. Results of this study clearly indicate the need for a revised teacher rating scale incorporating fewer areas.

The Matching Familiar Figures Test was administered to 8- to 9- and 10- to 11-year-old learning disabled and normal boys. Time and error data were analyzed separately and in combination according to the Salkind and Wright (1977) model of cognitive tempo to yield two additional variables, impulsivity and efficiency. Normal boys showed developmental changes on time and errors similar to prior findings; no development of time and errors was found for the learning disabled. Significant differences according to age and status were found on impulsivity, but not on efficiency. Results are discussed in terms of learning disabled and normal boys' comparative development of cognitive tempo, and in terms of implications for further investigation of the relevance of impulsive cognitive tempo to learning disabilities.

A controlled study using the Diagnostic Evaluation of Writing Skills (DEWS) verifies its efficacy in identifying students requiring special remedial instruction without recourse to batteries of standardized tests. The DEWS provides a basis for directing remediation into specific areas of greatest need. Its 41 assessment criteria enable the classroom teacher or the school administrator to monitor the performance and progress of individual students or classes. Graphical and statistical techniques are suggested that provide a method for obtaining an overall measurement for evaluating the effectiveness of reading and writing curricula.

This article reviews available research findings on the influence of illustrations on the reading performance (i.e., word recognition and reading comprehension) of beginning readers in general and in specific subgroups of beginning readers (e.g., poor achievers, low-ability students). Findings suggest that the presence of illustrations interferes with poorly achieving and low-ability children's performance on word recognition tasks and that illustrations are of questionable value to such children's performance on reading comprehension tasks. The possibility that illustrations serve to distract the poor reader's attention from the printed word is discussed. The inability to filter out extraneous stimuli and focus selectively on a task frequently seen in learning disabled children is presented in terms of selective attention theory. Suggestions are offered for further research on the effect of illustrations on learning disabled youngsters' reading performance.

The Continuous Performance Test was administered to normal and learning disabled males (CA 12.5) to test the proposition that learning disabled children manifest an attention deficit related to reading performance. Children were tested on two task lengths (4.45 and 9.30 minutes) and two modalities (auditory and visual) in which dependent measures were correct detections and false responses. As expected, learning disabled children with reading deficiencies made significantly fewer correct detections and more false responses than did normal children. There was no strong evidence to indicate that a visual presentation provided better attention for learning disabled children. Results were interpreted as supporting the notion that learning disabled readers are underattentive to critical stimuli.

First-grade entry ages were determined for all LD children in grades one through twelve in a large special education cooperative. The children were classified as early, medium, or late entering. U.S. Census data were consulted to determine the expected frequencies in each of these categories. It was found that there were more early-entering and fewer late-entering children in this sample than would be expected if entry age were a chance variable. Though more research is needed, the results of this study suggest the possibility that children who enter first grade early may be more likely to be labeled LD than children who enter when they are older.

The temporal stability of three levels of the Metropolitan Achievement Test (Primary I, Primary II, and Elementary) when administered to children with learning disabilities was investigated. Participants in the study were children identified by their schools as having learning problems based on discrepancies between their chronological age, mental age, and level of academic performance. The MAT was administered twice with a one-month interval between administrations. Many coefficients of temporal stability obtained were above the pre-established .80 cutoff point. It was concluded that the MAT is reliable when used with learning disabled children.

This study involves the use of 20 subtests from various instruments designed to measure potential learning disabilities in college-age students. The data show mechanical writing conventions rather than conceptual language skills to be deficient in college freshmen with problems in English composition. Implications of the study are drawn for the implementation of Section 504, Subpart E, of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

A sample of teachers of learning disabled students were surveyed to determine the competency levels they perceived themselves as having in the area of mathematics. The items in the survey were taken from the DCLD publication Code of Ethics and List of Competencies of Teachers of Learning Disabled Youth. The teachers responded to the survey voluntarily. The results indicated that, in general, teachers perceived themselves as having weaknesses in certain areas of content, assessment, and methodology. No significant correlation between number of credit hours in mathematics and/or mathematics education and number of stated competencies was found.