Clinical Judgments in Identifying and Teaching Children with Language-based Reading Difficulties

Expert educators continuously evaluate their students’ performance, adapting instructional programs to be as effective as possible for each child. This paper considers the information educators need to make these adaptations. The term educator refers here to professionals along the whole cascade of teaching services, from general classroom teachers, to learning specialists in smaller reading or special education settings, to therapists and specialists working one on one with the student experiencing difficulty. Because of reading’s critical role in learning and because of the prevalence of reading problems in children referred for special education, the paper focuses on decisions educators make about children with specific reading disabilities (SRDs), with specifically poor comprehension, or both. We consider these separately, because different kinds of language deficits underlie the two kinds of reading problems.