Learning Disabled Students\u27 Performance on the Child Behavior Checklist

The research to date on the behavioral and emotional problems of learning disabled students has focused mainly on young boys. A majority of the studies in this area have been done by Michael Epstein (Epstein, Cullinan, & Rosemier, 1983; Epstein & Cullinan, 1984; Epstein, Cullinan, & Neiminen, 1984; Epstein, Bursack, & Cullinan, 1985; Epstein, Cullinan, & Lloyd, 1986). He used the Behavior Problem Checklist (Quay & Peterson, 1987) to determine which behavioral/emotional items, rated by teachers of learning disabled students, loaded on certain factors. However, this instrument has been shown to be relatively unreliable; therefore, the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach & Edelbrock, 1983) was be used in this study. In this study, forty-three learning disabled children (boys and girls) from 5 to 16 were evaluated. The children\u27s parents filled out the Child Behavior Checklist based on their perceptions of their children\u27s behavioral/emotional problems. It was hypothesized that learning disabled children would differ from the non-clinical and clinical samples (that is, the original samples upon which the CBCL norms are based) on certain subscales of the Child Behavior Checklist. Primary analyses were performed on these hypotheses and some significant differences were found between the learning disabled sample and the non-clinical disabled sample and between the learning disabled sample and the clinical sample. It was found that the learning disabled children were significantly elevated on twenty-two out of twenty-five subscales as compared to the non-clinical sample