The question, “Have you had learners with either diagnosed or undiagnosed learning disabilities in your program?” was framed so those estimates of learning disabilities could be obtained in two ways. Firstly, overall estimates of learners with learning disabilities were obtained for each program. Secondly, estimates of specific learning disability typologies were obtained for each program. The specific learning disability estimates focus on five common conditions that potentially affect an individual‘s abilities to learn reading, writing, spelling and math skills. The five common conditions that potentially affect learning, outlined in the survey were learning disability exclusively, attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder (as these two conditions often occur combined with learning disabilities), fetal alcohol syndrome and intellectual disability.
The overall estimates of learners with learning disabilities are reported as follows:
Information obtained in this section focused on determining if diagnostic materials are in use for screening/assessments for learners at risk of having learning disabilities in adult literacy programs and if so, what. In addition, we were interested in developing a better understanding of how programs identify students with learning disabilities, if learners identified themselves and if this information is based on previous screening/assessments for learning disabilities. The purpose of gathering this information was to help determine the need for literacy programming that could take referrals for assessments of learning disabilities and/or provide training for literacy practitioners in the screening/assessment process. We were also interested in determining practitioners‘ preferences about how an outside agency could be accessed to best meet their needs, if made available.
Findings in this section showed that: