Differences between Students with Emotional Disturbance, Learning Disabilities, and without Disabilities on the Five Dimensions of Emotional Disturbance

The present study investigated evidence of the construct validity of scores from the Scales for Assessing Emotional Disturbance Rating Scale (SAED-3 RS), which is designed to help identify emotional disturbance (ED) as defined by U.S. law and regulations. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the degree to which SAED-3 RS scores differed between students with school-identified ED, students with school-identified learning disabilities (LD), and students without disabilities. The sample consisted of 2,193 K-12 students from throughout the U.S. The findings supported three hypotheses related to evidence of construct validity: (1) students with ED would differ from students without disabilities on all five dimensions of the SAED-3 RS; (2) students with ED would differ from students with LD on all dimensions of the SAED-3 RS except for the Inability to Learn dimensions; and (3) students with LD would differ from students without disabilities on all five dimensions of the SAED-3 RS, but that these differences would be smaller than the differences between students with ED and students without disabilities. Implications for practice and directions for future research are also discussed.