Accommodations. Techniques and materials that allow individuals with learning disabilities to complete school or work tasks with greater ease and effectiveness. Examples include spell-check programs, tape recorders, and expanded time for completing assignments.

Age Norms. Values representing typical or average performance of people in certain age groups.

Assistive Technology. Equipment used to maintain or improve the functional capabilities of individuals with disabilities.

Auditory Discrimination. Ability to detect differences among sounds, such as differences between the sounds made by a cat and a dog or differences between sounds of the letters m and n.

Basic Skill Area. A subject such as reading, writing, spelling, or mathematics.

Battery. A group of tests administered to an individual or group.

Cognitive Style. A person’s typical approach to learning and solving problems.

Compensation. Process by which a person is taught to cope with his or her leaning problems and to develop alternative ways of learning and solving problems.

Conceptual Disorder. Disturbances in thinking, reasoning, generalizing, or memorizing.

Decoding. Process of getting meaning from written or spoken symbols.

Developmental Disability.

Diagnostic test. A test designed to determine the specific learning needs of an individual.

Distractibility. The shifting of attention from the task at hand to sounds, sights, and other stimuli that normally occur in the environment.

Dyscalculia. Difficulty in understanding or using mathematical symbols or functions. A child with dyscalculia may be able to read and write but have difficulty performing mathematical calculations.

Dysgraphia. Difficulty in producing legible handwriting with age-appropriate speed.

Dyslexia. Impaired ability to read or to understand what one reads, either silently or aloud.

Expressive Language Disability. A disability characterized by limited vocabulary, deficits in expressive grammar, and deficits in pragmatic use of language.

Grade Equivalent. The estimated grade level corresponding to a given score.

Impulsivity. Reacting to a situation without considering the consequences.

Individualized Education Plan (IEP). Written plan that identifies a student’s strengths, weakness, educational needs, and needs for related services. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) mandates that an IEP be developed for each school-aged child (beginning at age 3) who is eligible for special education and related services and that the plan be reviewed at least annually.

Learning Style. The channels- such as vision, hearing, movement, touching, or any combination of these-through which a person best understands and retains learning; also, temperament, as in an active or passive learning style or a reflective or impulsive learning style.

Locus of Control. How a person tends to attribute successes and difficulties-either internally or factors such as effort or externally to factors such as chance.

Metacognition. Awareness of one’s own cognitive processes and of one’s own self-regulation, or what may be termed “knowing about knowing”.

Neurological Examination. Assessment of sensory and motor responses, especially reflexes, to determine whether the nervous system is impaired.

Neurologically-based Communication Disorders. Speech, language, or voice disorders caused by injury or illness affecting the brain or other portions of the nervous system.

Neuropsychological Evaluation. Assessment designed to draw inferences about the functioning of cerebral hemispheres and to identify the adaptive strengths and weaknesses of children with brain injuries. It complements a neurological examination by providing a profile of cognitive ability, sensorimotor functioning, and affective reactions.

Non-verbal Learning Disabilities. Syndrome in which children may have difficulty with tactile perception, psychomotor coordination, visual-spatial organization, nonverbal problem solving, reading comprehension, mathematics, and social relations but not with rote memory, word decoding, and writing.

Norm. Performance standard established by a reference group. Usually norms are determined by testing a representative group and then calculating standard scores for the group’s test performance.

Perceptual Disorder. Difficulty in accurately processing, organizing, and discriminating among visual, auditory, tactile information. A person with a perceptual handicap may say that cap and cup sound the same or that b and d look the same.

Perceptual-motor. Relating to the interaction of the various channels of perception with motor activity.

Perceptual speed. The rate at which an individual performs acts involving vision. It may refer to how fast something is copied or manipulated (motor speed) or how quickly identical items in a given series are identified (visual discrimination).

Psychological Evaluation. Assessment of an individual, usually consisting of the administration of a battery of psychological tests, an interview, and a behavioral observation.

Psychomotor. Pertaining to the motor effects of psychological processes. Performance on psychomotor tests may depend on perceptual-motor coordination.

Raw score. The number of items answered correctly on a test.

Reading Disorder. The most frequent form of learning disability, characterized by difficulty in reading.

Receptive Language. Language that is spoken or written by others and received by the individual. The receptive language skills are listening and reading.

Remediation. Process by which an individual is provided with instruction and practice skills that are weak or nonexistent in an effort to strengthen or develop these skills.

Sensorimotor. Pertaining to the relationship between sensation and movement.

Sequence. A consecutive ordering of events, numbers, or other information in some fashion, usually in time or space, or with respect to some dimension like size or magnitude.

Spatial Orientation. An individual’s awareness of space around him or her in terms of distance, form, direction, and position.

Spatial Relationships. Relationship between the self and two or more objects, as well as relationships of the objects to each other.

Specific Learning Disability. Disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or using language, spoken or written. It may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or do mathematical calculations.

Speech Impairments. Disorders that impair an individual’s ability to verbally communicate. This could include the inability to speak, the inability to maintain a flow or rhythm of speech (e.g., dysfluency or stuttering), or the inability to pronounce certain sounds. Speech impairments can be cause by hearing impairments, neurological disorders, mental retardation, or physical impairments such as cleft palate.

Standardized test. A form of measurement that has been normed against a specific population. Standardization is obtained by administering the test to a given population and then calculating means, standard deviation, standard scores, and percentiles. Equivalent scores are then produced to permit comparison of an individual score to the norm group’s performance.

Visual Discrimination. Ability to detect similarities and differences in materials presented visually-for example, to discriminate h from n or b from d.

Visual-motor Skills. Ability to translate information received visually into a motor response.

Visual Perception. Ability to correctly interpret what is seen.

Working Memory. Ability to hold a small amount of material in memory for a short time while simultaneously processing the same or other material.