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Assessment and decision making for students with learning disabilities: what if this is as good as it gets?

Article Excerpt
I was asked to address the future of the field of learning disabilities (LD) from the perspective of a director of one of the five Institutes for Research on Learning Disabilities (IRLD) funded by the Office of Special Education Programs more than 25 years ago. The theme of each of the Institutes differed; the Minnesota IRLD focused on assessment and decision making. We conducted research on how school personnel sorted students who were achieving poorly in school into those who were and those who were not LD, and worked to develop improved ways to use assessment information to plan and adapt instructional interventions. We pointed to the considerable variability at that time (late 1970s and early '80s) in the kinds and numbers of students receiving LD services in different settings, and to the tremendous variability in criteria used by state and local education agencies. On many days in many ways, we asked this question: Who are students with learning disabilities and what is being done for them in special education?

For five years we addressed a set of issues in assessment and decision making. We produced 144 research reports, and in 1983 (20 years ago) we (Ysseldyke et al., 1983) stated 14 generalizations based on the studies we conducted. An abridged version of these generalizations is found in Table 1.

In the conclusions to the 1983 paper we indicated that an alternative to current practice was one of intervening at the point of referral and using data on student performance to make eligibility decisions (an early call for a prereferral intervention or "response-to-intervention" approach). On many occasions since that writing, I have argued that we spend far too much of our professional time making predictions about students' lives, and far too little time making a difference in their lives. Documenting then prevalent assessment and decision-making practices, we argued that there was much to be gained by abandoning much of what we were doing (Ysseldyke et al., 1983).

Since our work more than 20 years ago, many have challenged our...

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