System-identification of mildly mentally retarded children: implications for interpreting and conducting research

The position was taken that the system identification of EMR children is designed to find children for service delivery and is not intended to identify a population with known parameters. Variability in the system derives from several sources: teacher judgment of academic failure, teacher referral, screening of referrals, and factors related to the assessment process. Moreover, recent litigation and sociopolitical forces have compounded this variability to the point of obscuring the population parameters of EMR or mildly mentally retarded children. The implications of such variability in characteristics of mildly retarded children were discussed in terms of interpreting past research and conducting future research.