In the 40-plus years since the "Individuals with Disabilities Education Act," special education has grown in the number of students and amount spent on services. Despite this growth, academic performance of students with disabilities remains troublingly low compared to general education students. To some extent, these differences reflect…

The purpose of this study is to evaluate how learning disabilities (LDs), in combination with accommodations, affect the performance of a decision-tree to predict the stability of academic behaviour of undergraduate engineering students. Additionally, this study presents several examples to illustrate how a college could use the resultant model to…

In the forty plus years since passage of the "Individuals with Disabilities Education Act" (IDEA), special education has grown in the number of students and amount spent on services. Despite this growth, the academic performance of students with disabilities (SWDs) remains troubling low compared to general education students (GENs). To…

This dissertation explores how federal education policies affect outcomes for special populations and their teachers. The first study uses a differences-in-differences design and data from the Stanford Education Data Archive to determine if "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) waivers reduced district-level white-black and white-Hispanic…

Recent research suggests that most 4-year college students diagnosed with specific learning disability (SLD) do not meet objective criteria for the disorder, show normative deficits in academic skills, or have childhood histories of SLD. The purpose of this study was to examine the functioning of students diagnosed with SLD attending community…

Approximately half of students who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) have a co-occurring disability. Although assessing as well as diagnosing learning disabilities (LDs) is particularly difficult in this population, it is important to properly identify students who may be eligible for academic interventions or accommodations. This study analyzed…

Ongoing research has demonstrated that culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students may be disproportionately represented among students with learning disabilities (LDs). The main aim of this research was to identify groups of CLD students at risk for LDs using the achievement criterion. To that end, 158 students participated in the…

Prior reviews of evidence for the impact of formative assessment on student achievement suggest widely different estimates of formative assessment's effectiveness, ranging from 0.40 and 0.70 standard deviations in one review. The purpose of this study is to describe variability in the effectiveness of formative assessment for promoting student…

The regression-based discrepancy definition of learning disabilities has been suggested by Rutter and Yule as an improvement of the well-known and much criticized achievement-intelligence discrepancy definition, whereby the examinee's predicted reading attainment is substituted for the intelligence score in the discrepancy expression. Even though…

Much has been written about gifted students with learning disabilities, but there have been few large-scale empirical investigations, and the concept has proven controversial. The authors reviewed the available empirical literature on these students, focusing on (a) the criteria by which the students were identified and (b) the students'…

The concept of moderate learning difficulties (MLD) is not clearly understood in its definition and in its general use. Nevertheless, as a distinct area of special educational needs (SEN) this category has constituted about a quarter of all of those pupils identified as having SEN in England. This paper reports the analysis of findings from an…

This study of 182 secondary special education students with emotional and/or behavioral disorders investigated their classification by their school districts, in particular how well they were distinguished and represented by their federal categories. The districts used four classification groups (emotional disturbance, other health impairment…

The literature has long pointed to heightened frequencies of learning disabilities (LD) within the population of law offenders; however, a systematic appraisal of these observations, careful estimation of these frequencies, and investigation of their correlates and causes have been lacking. Here we present data collected from all youth (1,337…

Psychoeducational assessment, and specifically cognitive testing, is important to the role of school psychologists; however, the utility of such testing has been called into question, and its future is unclear. Researchers are divided into two camps. One side grew disenchanted with cognitive testing after the failure of the discrepancy method to…

This disability category study was created to examine the relationship between the effects of inclusion with co-teaching methodologies on mathematics and language arts scores recorded from TCAP scores for 7th grade students who were found eligible for Special Education as having either a Specific Learning Disability or an Intellectual Disability.…