Welcome to the LEADERSproject (Law and Evidence-based Approaches for Disability Evaluation and ReSources), founded and directed by Dr. Cate Crowley. Our mission: Connecting clinical practice with law and research in order to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate services.
We have created this website as a place where clinicians, administrators, psychologists, and people with disabilities and their families can find information on the law, research, and current clinical practices related to assessment, treatment, and prereferral intervention both in the United States and internationally. The website includes videos, articles, and analyses that can be cited and used to support quality services for people with disabilities.
Our hope is simple—to ensure that children and adolescents receive quality diagnoses and services designed to ensure that they meet their highest potential.
This online resource provides a nexus of current research, law and policies, and clinical practice to identify and treat disabilities. This includes resources on how to distinguish a disorder from a difference, determine how to best address identified gaps, and ensure that practitioners acquire needed competencies.
The LEADERS site features a media library with video modules for practitioners and educators with a particular focus on appropriate disability evaluations, cleft palate and craniofacial issues, and treatment approaches from Dr. Crowley’s international work. A resource library includes the current legal framework; relevant research with suggestions on how to apply the findings into the clinical practice; resource manuals for specific languages highlighting developmental milestones; and analyses of validity, reliability, and bias for the most widely-used IQ, speech and language, and educational tests. The site includes Dr. Crowley’s recent articles and professional presentations including “Aligning IEP goals to the Common Core Standards,” “Bilingualism and Disabilities,” and “Developing Cultural Competence through International Experience.”
We have designed the site for all levels of proficiency. Someone may have a question about confidence intervals, or the construct validity of the WISC-IV, or materials in Spanish for parents of children with cleft palate. Others may want to acquire a broader understanding of disability evaluations that are consistent with the federal law, state regulations, current preferred policies and practices and the research. There is a way to acquire these skills.
We have also created reviews of the most widely used standardized tests to identify disability in the areas of special education, speech and language, cognition, and sensory-motor. These analyses reflect the validity, reliability, and bias issues including the strengths and weaknesses in these norm-referenced tests.
With a focus on bilingual populations, the LEADERSproject website offers language resource manuals and practice books for speakers of Amharic, Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, and Haitian-Creole.
