초등학교 학습장애 판별 준거에 관한 논의

Approach to the Identification of Learning Disabilities

학습장애의 판별에 관한 논쟁은 학습장애라는 용어가 사용된 이래 지금까지 지속되고 있다. 불일치 준거에 대한 끊임없는 문제제기와 더불어 IDEA는 불일치 준거의 폐지와 함께 중재반응기초 준거를 새로이 제시하였다. 이에 본 논문은 IQ와 성취 간의 불일치 모델을 기반으로 하는 학습장애 진단 준거에 대한 그동안의 주요 논의점을 검토해보고, 현재 진행되고 있는 학습장애 판별의 문제점들을 제기한다. 또한 최근 들어 여러 연구자들에 의해 불일치 준거의 대안으로 제시되고 있는 두 종류의 준거, 즉 인지기술 결함을 바탕으로 한 준거와 중재반응모델을 기반으로 하는 준거에 대해 학교현장에서 학습장애를 판별하는데 적용가능한지에 대해 살펴본다. 이러한 논의를 바탕으로 본 논문은 현장에 적용가능하면서 ‘순수한’ 학습장애를 판별하기 위한 다단계 진단과정을 제안한다.

Issues on how to identify children with learning disabilities have consistently been under debate in the area of special education. The criteria of a discrepancy between IQ and achievement had been widely used to identify the children with learning disabilities before IDEA adopted the new criteria on the basis of Responsiveness to intervention(RTI) model in 2004. Recently, cognitive approaches, particularly on reading disabilities, have also been used as the criteria to identify learning disabilities. Despite their own theoretical rationale, however, the previous approaches pose some problems in assessing various aspects of learning disabilities. This paper suggests a multiple-step procedure for the identification of children with learning disabilities. The multiple-step procedure emphasizes a pre-referral step in particular. The pre-referral step refers to a screening process to sort out the at-risk children from those who have learning difficulties due to other deficits. It is also suggested that various alternative interventions be used for the target children for a certain period of time in order to see if the target children's learning difficulties are originated from the teacher's inappropriate and insufficient instruction. This pre-referral step is important to avoid the possibility that children are incorrectly judged to have disabilities. This paper also recommends that both formal and informal diagnostic devices be used to solve the discrepancy between the potential ability and the actual achievement. The informal diagnostic devices need be adopted in the identification procedure since the formal standardized instruments are not sufficient to assess diverse properties of learning disabilities.