The relationship between gender, laterality, brain dominance, and learning-disabled labeling of selected elementary school-aged students in Dade County, Florida

Problem. The major purpose of this research was to identify right-hemispheric elementary-aged male students who are being labeled as learning disabled. Secondly, to find learning and teaching strategies that would assist these students in re-entering and progressing academically in the regular-self-contained elementary classroom. Subjects used. Subjects were from an LD gifted student population at Cutler Ridge Elementary School in Dade County, Florida. Twenty-one students were in the research study. An experimental and a control group were randomly assigned from this LD gifted group of students ranging from second to fifth graders. Findings and conclusions. There were two major questions to be answered in the study: (1) Is there any relationship between gender, laterality, brain dominance, and being placed in LD programs? (2) Is there a curriculum, a method or a strategy of teaching that will accommodate the right-brain student once he is identified? Assessment tools used to answer the first question or test the first hypothesis were a Teacher observation Checklist for Handedness, and the Style of Learning and Thinking (SOLAT) hemisphericity test for elementary-aged children by Paul Torrance and published by Scholastic Testing Services. Using a chi-square test of proportions, it was determined that there is a correlation between gender, laterality, brain dominance, and LD placement. In order to answer the second question regarding assisting these students (once they are identified) to re-enter and progress academically in the regular self-contained elementary classroom, a treatment of ten learning activities was developed and administered over a period of ten weeks for one hour per week. At the conclusion of the treatment, a post-test was administered by using the Matrix Analogies Test--Short Form by J. Naglieri and published by the Psychological Corporation. A differences between means of hypothesis tests was performed and the Z scores of the means of the percentile ranks, stanines, and age equivalents showed ...