Services and programs for academically talented students with learning disabilities

The Importance of Interventions and Specialized Services for Gifted Students With Learning Disabilities

Gifted students, like Joe and Sara, who have learning disabilities (gifted/LD) with unique and uneven profiles of strengths and weaknesses are rarely identified early and are often not served appropriately. Ferri, Gregg, and Heggoy (1997) found that approximately 41% of gifted students with learning disabilities remain undiagnosed until college. Reis, McGuire, and Neu (2000) corroborated these findings in their qualitative study of college students with learning disabilities who succeeded in college. Many of the students interviewed in their study reported that they had not been diagnosed until college. One can only speculate how many students with learning difficulties who also have potential never make it to college. Newman (2004) summarized existing literature to identify some of the undesirable outcomes for gifted students with learning disabilities (LD) resulting from late appropriate identification. Specifically, some students experience masking effects, that is, their gifts may be masked by their learning disabilities, or, alternatively, their learning difficulties may be masked by their areas of strength, as described in Baldwin and Vialle (1999). As a result, many of these students remain unidentified in public schools and neither their gifts nor their LD are served. Other students are placed in programs that address only their learning difficulties, which may lead gifted students with LD to frustration with school (Baum & Owen, 2004; Reis et al., 1995). Still others are placed in gifted programs based on their gifted profile, but also become frustrated when their learning difficulties are not recognized and addressed (Reis et al., 2000).

Academically talented students with LD like Joe and Sara become more successful when they learn to develop self-control, self-regulation, and the self-knowledge to follow a unique path to academic success and social competence (Reis et al., 2000). To help them succeed, teachers must enable these students to acquire a unique set of compensation strategies, a desire to succeed, specific methods to attain reasonable goals, and an understanding of how to compensate for their disabilities while enhancing their strengths. Educators must understand that LD are not permanent impairments to academic success and that they, in turn, must help students and parents regard their LD as personal attributes for which compensatory strategies can be learned. Reis, Neu, and McGuire (1997) found that academically talented students with LD who succeeded in a challenging academic university setting emphasized the benefits of having learned to successfully increase their persistence, despite encountering difficult and challenging experiences in elementary and secondary school.

Promising School Programs and Educational Interventions

Baum and Owen (2004) found that when teachers implement comprehensive programs designed to identify and develop individual gifts and talents, gifted/LD pupils begin to behave socially, emotionally, and academically more like gifted students without disabilities than like nongifted students with LD. These findings, corroborated by Bender and Wall (1994), and Baum and Olenchak (2002), indicate that, as educators diminish the attention to and importance of the disability and concentrate instead on the gifts, gifted/LD students become creatively productive. Reis and colleagues (1997) found that, when the focus was on students' gifts and talents, this attention to talent development enabled parents to advocate for additional opportunities for their children's education, and also resulted in higher levels of confidence in gifted students with LD.