LD News is a free e-publication of the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD). It is sent out monthly and addresses issues related to learning disabilities for parents, care-givers, educators, advocates and individuals with learning disabilities.

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Letter from NCLD
NCLD's Executive Director, James Wendorf, discusses Students with Learning Disabilities Transitioning from High School to College, a symposium hosted by NCLD and Educational Testing Service. 

Research Roundup
NCLD's Director of Professional Services, Dr. Sheldon Horowitz, discusses Giftedness and LD: Twice Exceptional and Still Struggling, and the frustration that occurs when a gifted student is also found to have a learning disability.

Policy Updates
Learn about public meetings on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), find a new online guide to IDEA from the U.S. Department of Education, and find out how states are measuring up to requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. 

News Desk
Learn more about an NCLD-ETS Symposium on postsecondary transition, find out how much the average American family is spending on school supplies this month, learn about a link between social and academic childhood development, and more.

LD Links
Find out about the improvements to NCLD’s Resource Locator, get some helpful tips on teaching children how to read, and read an interview with an author who 'wrote the book' against homework.

RTI Update:
RTI and UDL May Provide Benefits When Combined in the Classroom
Response-to-Instruction (RTI) is a process that helps to identify students at-risk for school failure, monitors responsiveness to instruction, and determines different courses of action in order to identify learning disabilities and respond accordingly as early as possible.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a new approach to curriculum that resists the impulse to categorize students as "typical," and encourages the recognition of each student's individuality, weaknesses, and strengths. UDL remodels curriculum design by bringing flexibility and accommodation to diverse students’ needs to the forefront. Modeled upon research in neuroscience, the UDL approach is based upon three fundamental networks of learning " recognition of information to be learned, application of strategies to process information, and engagement with the learning task.

Both RTI and UDL are ways to help students with disabilities participate and succeed in the general education curriculum, and help decipher whether it is the struggling student or the program itself that is falling behind. By combining these processes into the general education curriculum, it is hoped that a new curriculum can be formed that anticipates students' difficulties and eliminates the need for intervention.

A new paper from The Access Center provides an introduction to these strategies and explores the possibility of their intersection in the classroom.

To download a pdf of Response-to-Instruction and Universal Design for Learning: How Might They Intersect in the General Education Classroom? (14 pages), click here.