Eligibility for Students with Learning Disabilities
Certain criteria must be met in order for a student to receive appropriate accommodations for a learning disability. Students are expected to self-identify and present appropriate documentation to the Disability Resource Center. Secondary education eligibility reports, individualized education plans, and a history of receipt of special education services are not sufficient documentation for college-level accommodations. However, such information could be included within any comprehensive evaluation.
Criteria
- Documentation must be within 3 years of the student's application for assistance.
- Documentation must be comprehensive, including history, diagnostic interviews, test results (including standardized test scores when available), differential diagnosis, details regarding a student's functional limitations, and recommendations for accommodations which are appropriate in college, graduate, or professional educational settings.
- A diagnosis of a specific learning disability must be stated within the documentation submitted.
- The student must exhibit:
- Academic deficit(s) in one or more area(s) of academic achievement
- A correlated cognitive or information processing deficit explaining the academic deficit(s)
- Average intellectual ability
- All standardized measures must be represented by standardized scores and percentile ranks based on published norms. List subscale scores and, where available, index or cluster scores.
- Assessment instruments must have age appropriate norms for high school seniors, college freshman, or older non-traditional students.
- If another diagnosis is applicable, it should be stated.
- The evaluation must be on professional letterhead and signed by a certified or licensed professional with expertise in evaluating adolescent and adult populations.
Psycho-educational Components
- Intelligence. Average intellectual abilities should be defined as the students best verbal or nonverbal scores, or best fluid or crystallized domain scores on a standardized global measure of intelligence. A standard score of 90 or above will be considered in the average range.
- Achievement. Assessment in the following areas is required:
- Reading (decoding, rate, and comprehension)
- Mathematics (calculations, reasoning, and algebra)
- Written language (spelling, written expression, mechanics)
- Cognitive Processing. There must be evidence of correlated cognitive processing strengths and deficits identified on measures other than those used to obtain the global IQ score. Processing deficits and
strengths must be evident on multiple measures and not based on a single discrepant score on an individual test or subtest. Cognitive processing must be
identified in one or more of the following areas:
- Attention
- Oral language
- Phonological/Orthographic Processing
- Fluency/Automaticity
- Memory/Learning (Working Memory, Long Term Memory, and/or Short Term Memory)
- Executive Functions
- Visual-Perceptual/Visual-Spatial
- Visual-Motor
- Social-Emotional. Formal assessment instruments and/or clinical interview are appropriate.