Do Processing Patterns of Strengths and Weaknesses Predict Differential Treatment Response?

Objective: No previous empirical study has investigated whether the LD identification decisions of proposed methods to operationalize processing strengths and weaknesses (PSW) approaches for LD identification are associated with differential treatment response. We investigated whether the identification decisions of the concordance/discordance model (C/DM; Hale & Fiorello, 2004) and Cross Battery Assessment approach (XBA method; Flanagan, Ortiz, & Alfonso, 2007) were consistent and whether they predicted intervention response beyond that accounted for by pretest performance on measures of reading.

Method: Psychoeducational assessments were administered at pretest to 203 4 graders with low reading comprehension and individual results were utilized to identify students who met LD criteria according to the C/DM and XBA methods and students who did not.