Flanagan's operationalization of learning disability identification – does it work?

 
Henry Kissinger is known for his saying: "Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics", meaning that Israeli foreign-policy decisions are often driven less by a detached, long-term diplomatic strategy and more by internal political pressures.

In the field of learning disability identification as well, many professional positions are actually political positions. Should the definition of a learning disability require proof of a neurobiological/cognitive source for lowered achievement? In other words, should one identify low or impaired cognitive processes or abilities that underlie the diagnosed child’s difficulties in reading, writing, or arithmetic? This issue is debated, with the position supporting the requirement to prove a cognitive source for lowered achievement strengthening the role of psychologists, who are responsible for assessing intelligence and cognitive abilities.

The purpose of the study presented here was to examine the Flanagan model for defining learning disabilities, which supports the requirement to prove a cognitive source for lowered achievement, as well as another similar model that I will not discuss here. The model was examined with a group of 139 sixth- and seventh-grade students who had not responded well to intervention.

The research group included the well-known Jack Fletcher.

Jack M. Fletcher

Jack M. Fletcher, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Houston. For the past 30 years, Dr. Fletcher, a board-certified child neuropsychologist, has worked on issues related to child neuropsychology, including studies of children with spina bifida, traumatic brain injury, and other acquired disorders. In the area of developmental learning and attention disorders, Dr. Fletcher has addressed issues related to definition and classification, neurobiological correlates, and most recently, intervention.  He served on the NICHD National Advisory Council, the Rand Reading Study Group, the National Research Council Committee on Scientific Principles in Education Research, and the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education. He published 3 books and over 350 papers.  He was President of the International Neuropsychological Society in 2008-2009.

 Fletcher argues, that "there's a big question and a lot of controversy about what cognitive assessments add…I cannot find data that shows that cognitive assessments, strengths and weaknesses in cognitive skills, are related to intervention outcomes.  It's very hard to find… A bigger issue is that there is little evidence that there is additional value-added information that you get from an evaluation of cognitive skills if you've carefully evaluated achievement levels".  You can watch him make this argument here(minutes 07:24-08:10).  This video was shot in 2010, long before this study was published.

Here is a reminder of the identification criteria for learning disability according to Flanagan. The child must satisfy all criteria in order to be identified as learning-disabled.

1.     Low achievement, meaning a score one standard deviation or more below the mean, on tests of reading, writing, or arithmetic.

2. One or more of the child’s cognitive abilities — fluid reasoning, visual processing, auditory processing, processing speed, learning efficiency, retrieval fluency, short-term memory, or crystallized knowledge — is significantly lower than the population norm, meaning a score one standard deviation or more below the mean.
3. There is a logical or empirical relationship between the low achievement and the low ability. For example, weakness in crystallized knowledge makes it difficult for the child to understand what they read.
4. Most of the child’s cognitive abilities are intact. Normal functioning is within one standard deviation around the mean.
5. Exclusionary factors, such as sensory impairment, intellectual disability, emotional or social disturbance, cultural differences, the child being an immigrant/newcomer, or receiving inappropriate or insufficient instruction, are not the primary reason for the child’s low achievement.

In this study, 228 children in sixth and seventh grades received a Tier 2 reading intervention, the second level in the response-to-intervention model. The intervention took place in groups of ten to fifteen children and was held for one class period every day for an entire year — very impressive. The intervention included work on reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. The teachers who taught in the intervention program underwent sixty hours of training and also received ongoing guidance. In addition, during the year, the researchers assessed several times the teachers’ adherence to the program and the quality of their instruction.

In the spring of the intervention year, the children took three tests of basic reading and reading comprehension. Any child who received a low score on one or more of the tests was considered as not responding to the intervention. There were 139 such children.

At this point, the authors write that the sample reflects what is found in many middle schools that screen all children in a grade level with reading-screening tests: many of the students who do not respond well to intervention come from low socioeconomic backgrounds — 83.46% of the 139 students in this study — or from “linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds” — 13.53% of the 139 children in this study were speakers of English as a second language. The researchers note that the intervention the students received was in English only.

The article does not present data on the number of years these children, who speak English as a second language, had been in the United States. We should remember that immigration is an exclusionary factor for learning disabilities. In other words, it is possible that a large proportion of the 13.45% of children could not be defined as having learning disabilities because they were in the process of cultural and linguistic adaptation in the United States. It should also be taken into account that low socioeconomic background may impair cognitive development, especially crystallized knowledge but not only that, and that weaknesses in cognitive abilities among children from low socioeconomic backgrounds may result not from impairments in those abilities, but from a lack of opportunity to develop them.

However, exclusionary factors in general were not examined in this study.

In the fall of the year following the intervention year, the children took basic reading and reading comprehension tests, as well as cognitive tests intended to assess the various CHC abilities, in order to enable the definition of a learning disability according to Flanagan’s method.

The average group's scores in basic reading and spelling were average. The group scored more than one standard deviation below the mean on silent reading efficiency and reading comprehension, as well as on tests of reading comprehension.

Flanagan defines adequate assessment of a CHC ability as consisting of two subtests, each of which assesses a different narrow ability. However, in this study, retrieval fluency, fluid reasoning, short-term memory, crystallized knowledge, and processing speed were each assessed by only one test. In other words, each of these broad abilities was assessed by only one narrow ability — an insufficient assessment. Furthermore, the tests measuring working memory and processing speed had no national norms. The average group score in all ability tests was within the average range.

Only 24 children out of the 139 who had not responded to the intervention, 17%, met the criteria for a learning disability according to CHC.

The authors view this number as low, indicating that the definition of learning disability according to CHC is not effective for identifying children with learning disabilities.

But:

A. We have no way of knowing what the “true” percentage of children with learning disabilities should be in the group of 139 children who did not respond to intervention. It is reasonable to assume that not all children who did not respond to intervention have learning disabilities. Presumably, some of them did not respond because of various exclusionary factors that were not examined at all in this study, such as emotional factors. The group’s difficulties were focused on reading comprehension and not on basic reading. Because of the high percentage of disadvantaged children and immigrants in this group, it is certainly possible that learning disability was not the primary reason for their difficulties in reading comprehension. It is reasonable to assume that many of them have reading comprehension difficulties that stem from cultural and linguistic differences. Therefore, perhaps it is not surprising that the CHC approach diagnosed only 24 of them as having learning disabilities.

B. As noted, there were flaws in the implementation of the CHC-based process for defining learning disabilities in this study: the use of only one test to assess each cognitive ability, the use of tests without norms, and the failure to assess visual processing and learning efficiency. Because of the incorrect implementation of the method, I am not sure that conclusions can be drawn about its effectiveness. It is possible that with correct implementation, additional children could have been identified as having learning disabilities.

Miciak, J., Fletcher, J. M., Stuebing, K. K., Vaughn, S., & Tolar, T. D. (2014). Patterns of cognitive strengths and weaknesses: Identification rates, agreement, and validity for learning disabilities identification. School Psychology Quarterly, 29(1), 21.‏ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4111129/