Responsiveness to General Education Instruction as the First Gate to Learning Disabilities Identification

Most definitions of learning disabilities (LD) include a qualification that adequate general education instruction was received and the child with LD did not benefit. Rarely is this tenet assessed in either practice or research before a diagnosis is made. We review three studies that investigated children's responsiveness to general education reading instruction as an indicator of need for more intensive interventions. Adequacy of instruction was quantified by children's level and rate of progress, compared to classmates, as measured by curriculum-based measures of oral reading fluency. We found that the response-to-instruction model tested was valid in that (1) children who differ from their peers on level and slope of performance (dual discrepancy) have more severe academic and behavioral problems than children who have IQ-achievement discrepancies or low achievement; (2) children who demonstrate persistent nonresponsiveness over three years differ from other at-risk children on reading, reading-related, and behavioral measures; and (3) at-risk children who participated in specially designed general education interventions had better outcomes than at-risk children who did not participate. We conducted additional analyses to assess low achievement definitional variations and found that they lack sensitivity and coverage compared to a dual discrepancy definition.