A Rapid Screening Measure for the Identification of Visuospatial Learning Disability in Schools

Verbal and nonverbal forms of developmental learning disabilities have been reported. Whereas there are several instruments for evaluating children for the presence of verbal learning disabilities at school, no screening tool is available to identify children who have nonverbal learning disabilities. This study aimed at devising and validating a short screening questionnaire that can be used by teach-ers in primary schools to identify those children who need to be referred for clinical services because they have a visuospatial learning disability (VSLD). An 18-item Shortened Visuospatial Questionnaire (SVS) was derived from an earlier, longer version. Its validation pro-cedure was twofold and was achieved by (a) verifying that children who had been identified with the SVS questionnaire as having a VSLD actually showed visuospatial deficits on psychometric evaluation and by (b) rating with the SVS a clinically identified population of children with VSLD. The results of the validation procedure showed that the SVS is a quick, reliable, and valid instrument that may be helpful in identifying children with VSLD in primary school. Alarge body of evidence (seeWong, 1996, for an overview)has shown that there are sub-groups within the large, ill-defined population of individuals with learn-ing disabilities (LD). One large sub-group includes individuals whose un-derlying neuropsychological deficits include linguistic abilities—sometimes purely verbal, sometimes associated with visual deficits (Eden, Stein, Wood, & Wood, 1995). There is, however, a small subgroup with intact verbal abil-ities but with deficits in areas of cogni-tion other than language—in particu-lar, visuospatial and visuomotor area