Georgia Board of Regents Criteria for Accpeting Outside Evaluatons Documenting Learning Disabilities

  1. Documentation must be within 3 years of the student's application for assistance. (The exception to this guideline in some instances is if the evaluation was completed after the student was 18 years of age and the evaluation utilized appropriate adult standardized tests and is still considered by an RCLD to adequately represent an individual's current functioning.) Documentation must be comprehensive, including history, diagnostic interviews, test results (including standardized test scores when available), differential diagnosis, details regarding a student's functional limitations, and recommendations for accommodations which are appropriate in college, graduate or professional educational settings.
  2. A specific learning disability must be stated within the documentation submitted. The student must exhibit academic deficit(s) in one or more, but not all, areas of academic achievement; a correlated cognitive or information processing deficit; and average intellectual ability. There must be documentation of both an academic deficit and a correlated processing deficit. Documentation of only academic deficit(s) or only processing deficit(s) is not sufficient. If another diagnosis is applicable, it should be stated. The evaluation must be signed by a professional with expertise in evaluating adolescent and/or adult populations and appropriately licensed by the state.
  3. One of the following individually administered general intelligence tests must have been utilized. 
    Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-III)
    Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III)
    Stanford Binet IV
    Kaufman Adult Intelligence Test (KAIT)
    Differential Ability Scales (DAS)
    Woodcock Johnson-III - General Intellectual Ability (Standard or Extended) Please list subscale scores and, where available, index or cluster scores. 

    Average intellectual abilities will be defined as the student's best verbal/nonverbal or best fluid/crystallized domain score on a standardized global measure of intelligence. A standard score of 90 or above will be considered in the average range. 
  4. Achievement assessment in the following areas is required:
     
    1. Reading (decoding, rate, and comprehension)
    2. Mathematics (calculations, reasoning, and algebra)
    3. Written Language (spelling and written expression) If available for review, a written language sample is most helpful.
    To be considered an area of academic deficit, a student's individually administered standardized achievement test results must fall at least a standard deviation below the student's intellectual abilities, or a standard deviation below the student's other academic abilities as assessed by the same measures. 
  5. There must also be evidence of correlated cognitive processing deficits and processing strengths identified on measures other than those used to obtain the global IQ score:
     
    1. There must be processing deficit(s) identified in one or more of the cognitive processing areas listed below. Oral language must be assessed. The deficit must represent a logical basis for the academic deficit. For example, one would not expect a specific fine motor deficit to be directly linked to a reading disability. Processing deficits must be evident on multiple measures and not based on a single discrepant score on an individual test or subtest.
       
      1. Attention
      2. Oral Language
      3. Phonological/Orthographic Processing
      4. Fluency/Automaticity

      5. Memory/Learning (Working Memory, Long Term Memory, and/or Short Term Memory)

      6. Executive Functions

      7. Visual-Perceptual/Visual-Spatial

      8. Visual-Motor

    2. There must also be evidence of processing strengths identified in one or more of the cognitive processing areas listed above. Processing strengths must also be evident on multiple measures and not based on a single discrepant score on an individual test or subtest.

  6. Social-emotional status must be assessed and discussed. Formal assessment instruments and/or clinical interview are appropriate.

Assessment instruments must have age appropriate norms for high school seniors/college freshmen or older non-traditional students. All standardized measures must be represented by standard scores and percentile ranks based on published norms. These certainly can be supplemented by informal assessment. If scores based on specialized norms are used (e.g., two year or four year college norms), it will also be necessary to provide scores based on general population norms, if those scores are available in the manual.

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