The purpose of this article is to respond to Reid and Valle's article "The Discursive Practice of LD: Implications for Instruction and Parent?School Relations" in this issue. Our response to the discursive analysis is organized around two major themes: (a) the issue of balance in the scholarship on learning disabilities (LD) and (b) the centrality…

Gersten, Jordan, and Flojo (in this series) review their research on math difficulties, with an emphasis on applying current knowledge to inform practices of early identification and intervention. On a practical level, educators are in dire need of empirically based screening and intervention tools. From a scientific perspective, it is important…

People with learning disabilities from minority ethnic communities face many layers of disadvantage. Providing services that are culturally appropriate and sensitive can be difficult. Through the use of clinical examples the issues, tensions and dilemmas raised for a community learning disabilities team in attempting to provide culturally…

Several studies have shown that children with learning disabilities (LD) have difficulty in inhibiting irrelevant information, which generates endogenous interference from working memory. Other inhibition capacities have not yet been investigated, however. This article reports on an experiment examining the capacities of children with LD to…

In this paper the small body of research which looks at how people labelled as having learning disabilities view this social identity is considered. The author argues that this research has implications for our assumptions about self-advocacy groups for people with learning disabilities.

This response focuses on the effects of the current construction of learning disabilities (LD) on families of children from devalued racial/ethnic groups. Agreeing with the arguments of Reid and Valle, we add that parents from such groups are further disenfranchised because they are not participants in the critical discourse surrounding LD and…

The executive functions of inhibition and shifting were studied in arithmetic-disabled children, reading-disabled children, reading plus arithmetic-disabled children, and controls (N = 74). Measures involved the rapid naming of objects, digits, letters, or quantities with or without additional task requirements that reflected inhibition or…

Responsiveness to intervention (RTI) is being proposed as an alternative model for making decisions about the presence or absence of specific learning disability. I argue that there are many questions about RTI that remain unanswered, and radical changes in proposed regulations are not warranted at this time. Many fundamental issues related to RTI…

Comprehensive, authoritative, and designed for practical utility, this handbook presents evidence-based approaches for helping struggling readers and those at risk for literacy difficulties or delays. Leading experts explain how current research on all aspects of literacy translates into innovative classroom practices. Chapters include clear…

The studies in this volume explore a number of issues in education today. One paper reveals what actually motivates teachers to develop their career, another, how to teach primary teachers to talk about visual art. Children's artworks were explored in one article to see how they relate to their adjustment to school. In another, a case study was…

In this study, a mixed methods approach was used to gather descriptive exploratory information regarding the teaching of science to middle grades students with learning disabilities within a general education classroom. The purpose of this study was to examine teachers' beliefs and their practices concerning providing equitable opportunities for…

In this paper, data obtained from a university website accessibility and usability validation process are analyzed and used to demonstrate how the design process can affect the online experience for users with disabilities. Interviews, observations, and use data (e.g. where users clicked on a page or what path taken through a site) were collected.…

The Commission on No Child Left Behind (the Commission), a bipartisan, independent commission formed to develop recommendations for the upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, released its report on February 13, 2007. The Commission spent the past year traveling across the country, hearing from students, educators, parents,…

Is it necessary to posit separate, explicit distinctions between representations in order to account for dissociations between consonant and vowel processing? We argue that a cognitive model of speech production based on cumulative lower-level properties is not only sufficient but more parsimonious in accounting for aphasic and dysgraphic patient…

Current neurocognitive theories of number processing [Dehaene, S., Piazza, M., Pinel, P., & Cohen, L. (2003). Three parietal circuits for number processing. "Cognitive Neuropsychology," 20, 487-506] state that mathematical performance is made possible by two functionally and anatomically distinct subsystems of number processing: a verbal system…