The renewal of IDEA (2004) produced a number of changes in the identification process for children with Specific Learning Disabilities (SLDs). The requirement that students must present a severe discrepancy between IQ and academic performance has been modified to allow for a more flexible problem-solving approach commonly labeled "Response to…

Each month, the Literacy Information and Communication System ("LINCS") will feature one of the three LINCS Resource Collections--Basic Skills, Program Management, and Workforce Competitiveness--and introduce research-based resources that practitioners can use in their adult and family literacy programs and classrooms. This edition features the…

The "Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing"[R] ("LiPS"[R]) program (formerly called the "Auditory Discrimination in Depth"[R] ["ADD"] program) is designed to teach students the skills they need to decode words and to identify individual sounds and blends in words. Thirty-one studies reviewed by the What Works…

"Orton-Gillingham" is a broad, multisensory approach to teaching reading and spelling that can be modified for individual or group instruction at all reading levels. Teaching sessions are action oriented with auditory, visual, and kinesthetic elements reinforcing one another. The approach targets persons with the kinds of language…

Working in a school with a high proportion of dyslexic children has helped this author to discover and improve her teaching of science. Officially, dyslexia is seen as "a specific learning difficulty that hinders the learning of literacy skills. This problem of managing verbal codes in memory is neurologically based." Many children come to the…

Using the lens of critical theory, this article explores the tenuous relationship between special education and French Second Language (FSL) education, particularly as it manifests in the issue of including students with language-based learning disabilities/difficulties within the French immersion context. Drawing on considerations of these issues…

The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) is the most widely used measure of psychopathy in forensic clinical practice, but the generalizability of the measure to offenders with intellectual disabilities (ID) has not been clearly established. This study examined the structural equivalence and scalar equivalence of the PCL-R in a sample of 185 male…

In recent years, Arts Education in America's secondary schools has been underfunded, undervalued, and underdeveloped. Music, in particular, has been under siege in the "No Child Left Behind" era as teachers increasingly teach students to pass specific written tests, and administrators focus on improving these test scores and struggle with related…

In many respects epilepsy is as much a social disorder as it is a physical one. With epilepsy's long human history, many misconceptions have grown around the disorder. Those misconceptions have taken on a life of their own. Mistaken ideas that epilepsy is some form of evil possession, that it is a form of mental illness, that people with epilepsy…

This study used a multiple baseline across participants design to examine the effects of self-monitoring and active responding on the reading comprehension of three high school seniors with learning disabilities and significant attention problems. The self-monitoring intervention required the participants to read a story and stop reading at three…

Risk taking may be regarded as a normative behavior in adolescence. Risk-taking behaviors may include alcohol, smoking, drug use, delinquency, and acts of aggression. Many studies have explored the relationship between adolescents and risk-taking behavior; however, only a few studies have examined this link in adolescents with learning…

In questioning conventional qualitative research methods, St. Pierre asked, "What else might writing do except mean?" The author answers, it oppresses. Co-opting the race traitor figurative, she calls on qualitative researchers to become "ability traitors" who interrogate how a valuable coinage of their trade--the written word--is used to rank and…

Phonological awareness is a key factor in the development of literacy, and frequently presents itself as an area of weakness in pupils with reading difficulties. In this article, Anies Al-Hroub of the American University of Beirut sets out to define a distinguishing pattern of characteristics that supports the identification of pupils with…

Regardless of disability status, adolescents benefit from planning and instruction as they prepare to move forward into adulthood. For those with disabilities, however, transition education--that is, the planning, direct instruction, and experiential learning that helps adolescents make decisions and gain requisite attitudes, knowledge, and…

This article demonstrates how the broad and narrow abilities and processes that comprise Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory and their relations to specific academic outcomes have begun to transform our current understanding of the definition of and methods for identifying specific learning disability (SLD), particularly in the school setting. The…