Early identification of ASD allows for clinical intervention through mental and behavioral health supports, potentially providing individualized services in the educational setting. This article highlights the research-to-practice gap that exists within evaluations for ASD in schools. Lack of training, variability in assessment guidelines,…

This chapter summarizes issues related to the accurate and timely identification of students with emotional and/or behavioral disorders (EBDs) as well as identifying need, planning interventions, and monitoring outcomes. First, we describe ongoing issues and concerns with accurate (e.g., minimization of false positives and false negatives) and…

Previous studies of K-12 dyslexia legislation have described broad trends in legislative content, such as the presence or absence of screening and intervention requirements. This study uses document analysis to provide a finer-grained description of the laws to highlight critical variation in policy that will directly affect (a) the number and…

The purpose of this article is to provide the reader with insight into the clinical reasoning involved in the assessment and intervention planning for a child with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. The reader will be guided through the authors' conceptualization of this case, and suggestions for intervention in the classroom will be…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires 95% participation in state achievement testing. Students with the most significant cognitive disabilities participate in states' alternate assessments based on alternate academic achievement standards (AA-AAAS). A growing number of these students are also English learners (Christensen et al., 2018).…

Identification process is an important element of behavior disorder management in schools. For proper behavior management teachers need to identify learners with behavioral disorders in order to design intervention programs befitting their educational needs. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to analyze the intervention strategies teachers…

Background: Despite a reported excess of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms in individuals with intellectual disability, it has been argued that ADHD symptoms have been under diagnosed and inadequately treated in individuals with intellectual disability. Materials and methods: Published studies focussing on the level of ADHD…

Research has demonstrated that many children have learning problems related to deficits in specific cognitive processes that are not adequately represented by a single IQ score. The administration of cognitive measures that include narrow abilities is useful in understanding specific learning problems and developing effective interventions.…

This study investigates how state Departments of Education address the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students as they relate to the identification of students with a specific learning disability (SLD). A qualitative research design of directed content analysis was used to examine each state's regulatory criteria for SLD, as…

Youth exhibiting symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are frequently referred to school psychologists because of academic, social, and behavioral difficulties that they face. To address these difficulties, evidence-based assessment methods have been outlined for multiple purposes of assessment. The goals of this study were to…

A "big idea" is a concept that gives meaning to discrete facts. In this article, the author proposes a small number of big ideas, as well as his own views on where he thinks the field needs to move to achieve its full promise in school-based behavioral and social-emotional assessment. The three big ideas he has selected include: (1) universal…

In this article, the authors clarify the role of the leadership team, providing a rationale for one integrated team to examine academic, social, and behavioral programming, with careful attention to including all key stakeholders. Next, the authors discuss the procedures for teaching all key stakeholders the comprehensive, integrated, three-tiered…

This study surveyed a national sample of school psychologists with respect to the identification of reading disabilities (RD). It covers school psychologists' opinions regarding perceived benefits of the use of cognitive assessment in RD identification, both within and outside of an IQ-achievement discrepancy model. The survey also solicited…

This article describes how actuarial methods can supplant discrepancy models and augment problem solving and Response to Intervention (RTI) efforts by guiding the process of identifying specific learning disabilities (SLD). Actuarial methods use routinized selection and execution of formulas derived from empirically established relationships to…

The assessment procedures within Response to Intervention (RTI) models have begun to supplant the use of traditional, discrepancy-based frameworks for identifying students with specific learning disabilities (SLD). Many RTI proponents applaud this shift because of perceived shortcomings in utilizing discrepancy as an indicator of SLD. However,…