Early Identification of Children with Learning Disabilities

Forty-eight kindergarten classes including over 1,200 children were screened for potential learning disorders. Kindergarten teachers used objective observations of the children's performance on gross muscle coordination, verbal fluency, speech development, auditory memory, auditory discrimination, visual memory, visual discrimination, visual motor performance, directionality, and laterality. Final selection of 106 children included in the study was done by psychological and psycholinguistic individual and group tests. Two analyses of the data were made: a correlation analysis and a principle components analysis. Test profiles indicated that the teachers’ observations were useful in the selection of children with developmental retardation. Differences in rate and accuracy of performance were masked when performance scores were treated as a group. The identifiable commonality among the thirty-one variables was general language, which accounted for 20.1 percent of the variance of the scores.