Has the Learning Disabilities Field Lost Its Intelligence?

Abstract

The field of learning disabilities (LD) has a checkered history that is lit-tered with contention, false starts, fads, dead ends, pseudoscience, and just a little bit of hard-won progress. It seems as though the field is constantly getting in-to scrapes, is always on probation, is never really secure. Why is this? Surely one of the reasons is that, when borrow-ing ideas from allied fields such as de-velopmental psychology, neuropsychology, and cognitive psychology, the LD field has displayed a remarkable propensity to latch on to concepts that are tenuous and controversial. Examples of this tenden-cy are legion, ranging from visual pro-cess training to the concept of minimal brain damage. The LD field seems ad-dicted to living dangerously. However, even in the context of such a history, the decision to base the defini-tion of a reading disability on a discrep-ancy with measured IQ is still nothing short of astounding. Certainly one would be hard-pressed to find a concept more controversial than intelligence in all of psychology. It has been the subject of dispute for decades, and this shows no sign of abating. Current work on indi-vidual differences in intelligent function-ing continues to produce exciting find-ings and interesting theories (Baron,

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