You are sitting with
professionals who know about learning disabilities. They have been explaining what they will be looking for when they test your child."We look for an aptitude-achievement discrepancy as well as a processing deficit," one of them explains.
Your eyes glaze over and you begin to feel you're not too smart. It's like they're speaking another language. You haven't a clue what these people are talking about.
Actually, I've always felt that special education does use a foreign language.
That doesn't, however, mean that you can't learn it. Like any language, after a while, you'll get it.
When you meet with Pupil Evaluation Team, or Case Conference Committee, or Child Study Team, or whatever it's called in your area, you will probably hear sentence mentioned above.
Let's chop that sentence into pieces:
"We look for an aptitude-achievement discrepancy..."
Your child's aptitude is his ability to learn. When I was in school, we called it an IQ. In order for someone to have a learning disability, he has to have at least average aptitude for learning. In other words, he needs to have ability to learn as well as any average child of his age.
His achievement refers to how well he is learning, or extent to which he has received information and mastered certain skills. This may be where problems show up.
The evaluator looks at whether there is a big difference, or discrepancy, between those two scores - aptitude and achievement. Is there a big difference between what he SHOULD HAVE learned and what he really has learned?
Let's say your child has an aptitude of 100, which is exactly average. That means that he should be able to learn things as well as any average student of his age or grade. But let's say that test found him to be achieving only at a level of 60 in reading. That's 40 points below what he SHOULD BE doing in reading. That's important information.
