At present, university students with a learning disability (LD) are identified by a lengthy, expensive battery of tests administered by an educational psychologist, and some are discouraged from seeking assessment by the cost and perceived difficulty of this process. Its purpose is to provide the student and the university with a detailed cognitive profile of the student’s strengths and weaknesses, as a basis for deciding what measures will be needed to enable each individual to study without disadvantage. However, the LD reports are often hard for students to understand, and in the absence of trained LD tutors, this information remains under-utilised. We considered whether a simpler approach might be feasible.

Our project trialed an alternative instrument, adapted for use in Australia from the York Adult Assessment developed in the U.K. The objective was to enable university staff in disabilities and academic skills units to identify students with dyslexia quickly, easily, and at no cost to the student, and to recommend a limited range of appropriate accommodations based on the result. The instrument was trialed by volunteers already identified as having LD, and a control group. Unfortunately, the trial showed that the instrument may fail to identify at least two-thirds of students with LD, so its use cannot be recommended, and the need for a reliable alternative instrument remains. This presentation will consider the problems surrounding the present method of assessment, and discuss the methodological problems of devising an alternative.