Construction and Standardization of Verbal Learning Disabilities Checklist for School Children

For identifying children with four major kinds of verbal learning disabilities viz. reading disability, speech and language comprehension disability, writing disability and mathematics disability, the present task was undertaken to construct and standardize verbal learning disabilities checklist. The checklist was developed by keeping in view the Indian school and social situations where school going children are being nurtured. For that, the data were collected from school teachers, parents, learning disabled and normal school children belonging to 9 to 15 years age group by adopting the procedure of purposive sampling technique at different stages. An item pool was developed initially by consulting various sources and theoretical and empirical literature available in the concerned area and organizing intensive discussions with experienced school teachers, teacher educators, parents of disabled children, teachers serving in special schools, psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians and educational counselors. The preliminary draft of verbal learning disabilities checklist was given to 35 field experts (experienced school teachers, teacher educators, teachers serving in special schools, psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians and educational counselors) to critically judge and evaluate the content accuracy, relevance, logic, duplication/repetition and coverage of the items. Items of checklist were again put to intensive evaluation so that the checklist only contain those statements/items which are highly capable of discriminating between a learning disabled child from a normal child without any learning disability. This was carried out by judging the consensus between teachers' ratings and parents' ratings in respect of learning disabled children. The reliability of the checklist was ascertained with the help of test-retest reliability (separately for teachers' ratings and parents' ratings) and inter-rater reliability (between teachers and parents' ratings) by computing correlation indices. The validity of checklist was also ascertained and suggestive norms were developed for initial identification of children with verbal learning disabilities. These norms were developed by taking into account the expert advice of experienced school teachers, pediatricians, psychologists and psychiatrists and can be used just for referral to expert assessment and diagnosis of verbal learning disabilities among the school going children.