Our experienced staff in the Office of Student Disability Services will help arrange the services you need to transition to college and succeed as a student. In order to access these services, you must first provide the Office with documentation no more than three years old.
Qualifications of the Evaluator: The professional conducting assessments must be qualified to render diagnoses of learning disabilities and make recommendations for
appropriate accommodations. Comprehensive training and direct experience with an adolescent and adult LD population is essential. The name, title, and professional credentials of the evaluator, including information about license or certification as well as the area of specialization, employment, and state/province in which the individual practices should be clearly stated in the documentation.
Comprehensive Assessment: The neuropsychological or psychoeducational evaluation of the diagnosis of a specific learning disability must provide clear and specific evidence that a learning disability does or does not exist. Assessment, and any resulting diagnosis, should consist of and be based on a comprehensive assessment battery, which does not rely on any one test or subtest. This assessment should include a diagnostic interview to determine medical, development, psychosocial, family, academic, and employment histories.
It should include assessment of:
Cognitive Skills
A complete battery, appropriate for an adult population, with all subtest standard scores reported. One of the following would be required:
- Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R)
- Woodcock-Johnson Psychoeducational Battery-Revised: Test of Cognitive Ability
- Kaufman Adolescent and Adult Intelligence Test
Achievement
A complete battery relevant to area(s) of suspected disability(s), often to include a reading assessment, with all subtest and standard scores reported. Examples of commonly used tools are:
- Woodcock-Johnson Psychoeducational Battery-Revised: Tests of Achievement
- Stanford Test of Academic Skills (TASK)
- Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT)
- Nelson-Denny Reading Skills Test
Information Processing
An examination of the student’s processing strengths and weaknesses to include areas such as short and long term memory, processing speed, metacognition etc., gathered from the comprehensive assessment, diagnostic interview, and examiner’s observations of test behavior.
Diagnosis:
This section should include an identification of a specific learning disability based upon the information from the comprehensive assessment and a diagnostic interview.
The diagnosis must:
- Indicate a substantial limitation;
- Rule out alternatives;
- Indicate reasonable accommodations specific to diagnosed disability.
Clinical Summary
A diagnostic summary based on a comprehensive evaluation process is a necessary component of the report. The clinical summary should include:
- Demonstration of the evaluator’s having ruled out alternative explanations for academic problems as a result of poor education, poor motivation and/or study skills, emotional problems, attentional problems, and cultural language differences;
- Indication of how patterns in the student’s cognitive ability, achievement, and information processing reflect the presence of a learning disability;
- Indication of the substantial limitation to learning or other major life activity presented by the learning disability and the degree to which it impacts the individual in the learning context for which accommodations are being requested;
- Indication as to why specific accommodations are needed and how the effects of the specific disability are accommodated;
- Any record of prior accommodations or auxiliary aids, including information about specific conditions under which accommodations were used;
- Specific recommendations for accommodations as well as an explanation as to why each accommodation is being recommended.