Abstract
In this last issue of Volume 25 of Learning Disabilities Research & Practice (LDRP), we are pleased to offer both research and practice articles. On the journal's home page, we state that the purpose of the journal is to publish articles that address “the nature and characteristics of children and adults with learning disabilities, program development, assessment practices, and instruction.” We recognize that our field is multidisciplinary and aim to reach “professionals involved in a variety of different disciplines including special education, school psychology, counseling, reading, and medicine.” To this end, we include two sections of the journal, one for original research studies, research compilations, or syntheses and another for research–to–practice articles.
The articles published in this issue represent a broad scope of topics of importance to the field of learning disabilities. All of the articles demonstrate how research informs our practice. The first article, by Evmenova and colleagues, examines the effectiveness of word prediction programs often used by students with disabilities to improve spelling performance in writing tasks. Such writing assistance programs are widely used, and this study provides evidence in support of their use.
The advent of response to intervention (RTI) in the field has led to increased interest in reading intervention programs that can be readily implemented by teachers. The second article, by Vernon–Feagans et al., reports a study of teacher implementation of a Tier 2 reading intervention program in rural schools. The teachers in the experimental condition received professional development, coaching, and ongoing support for their implementation. The authors report student outcomes for treatment and comparison groups. Their discussion of implementation issues is timely and informative.
The third article in this issue, by Gresham and Vellutino, also provides insight into the RTI process. These authors question the use of IQ scores in the process of identifying students with learning disabilities, a topic that has been debated in prior studies. The authors review key arguments presented in prior studies and raise the important question of whether IQ scores have predictive ability in measuring responsiveness to intervention.
The fourth article turns our attention to the population of adults with learning disabilities. Ahrens and colleagues present a study that examined the impact of mentoring relationships on adult outcomes.
In the Practice section, we have an informative article by Mellard and colleagues. This article describes dimensions of increasingly intensive intervention in an RTI framework, with illustrations from data collected in numerous schools involved in a large–scale project. They provide practical implications and guidelines that will be useful to practitioners in the field.