Living With LD

This page is a special learning disability resource where you will find short articles of interest to people affected by learning disorders.


Oct 2004
What Parents Need to Know About the Instructional
Program for their Learning Disabled Child
by Porfirio Calaycay, Chartered Psychologist, Edmonton

The instructional program for a learning-disabled child in Alberta to accommodate his or her particular learning problems is called an Individualized Program Plan (IPP). It is important for parents to know the following:

1. specific goals of instruction;
2. strategies and materials to be used for achieving each specific goal;
3. the rate of success established for considering a goal to have been achieved; and
4. assessments on which the IPP are based.

Which aspect of reading needs to be improved? Is it sight recognition, word attack skills, or sentence comprehension? If, for example, it is sentence comprehension, what level of sentence comprehension is the starting level and what is the rate of success at each level for mastery to have been achieved in order to go on to the next level?

Strategies and materials also have to be specific. Using sentence comprehension as an example again, what is the strategy to be used when a student cannot comprehend beyond a simple sentence? If a commercially available program or a teacher-made lesson is to be employed as the instructional material, parents should have that explained to them. They should also be made aware of what strategies will be used and the specific goal to be achieved.

The rate of success for achieving a goal is specific when it can be stated as a number. For instance, to state that a student has improved in his word attack skills is not enough. An example of success rate is: The student can decode by phonetic analysis regularly sounding words of up to 3 (three) syllables 9 (nine) times out of 10 (ten) or 90% (ninety percent) of the time.

Much of the ineffectiveness of IPPs or any other special instructional program is lack of specifics and quantifiability. The relationship of the IPP to the assessment results on which it is supposed to have been based should also be specified.

Some assessment reports are so vague that they cannot be clearly related to an IPP. When this happens, further assessment should be done, and not necessarily by a psychologist, in order to clarify the previous vague assessment. Some suggested alternatives would be special education teachers, pedagogical specialists and clinical social workers.

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