Do Processing Patterns of Strengths and Weaknesses Predict Differential Treatment Response?

Area of Science:

• Educational Psychology
• Learning Disabilities Research
• Psychoeducational Assessment

Background:

• Processing Strengths and Weaknesses (PSW) approaches are used for learning disability (LD) identification.
• Previous empirical studies have not examined if LD identification decisions from PSW approaches predict treatment response.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the consistency between the concordance/discordance model (C/DM) and the Cross Battery Assessment (XBA) method for LD identification.
• To determine if LD identification via C/DM and XBA predicts reading intervention response beyond pretest reading performance.

Main Methods:

• Administered psychoeducational assessments to 203 4th graders with low reading comprehension.
• Identified students meeting LD criteria using C/DM and XBA methods.
• Investigated agreement between identification methods and association between LD status and reading intervention response.

Main Results:

• The C/DM and XBA methods demonstrated poor agreement (κ = -.10) in identifying LD.
• No significant differences in posttest reading performance were found between students identified as LD and those not identified, with small effect sizes.

Conclusions:

• LD status determined by C/DM and XBA was not associated with differential response to intensive reading intervention.
• These cognitive assessment methods, used in this manner, do not provide educationally meaningful information for predicting intervention outcomes in LD identification.