So what is the process of identifying a Learning Disability?
The steps in identifying an individual with a learning disability begin with a referral.  Usually a teacher, and usually in the early primary grades, will refer a student for a very general lack of progress. 

On the basis of this referral, a screening assessment may be done by the learning resource teacher.  The purpose of this testing is to establish whether further assessment or special interventions are needed.  Sometimes a child's difficulties are not educational in nature.   For example, it may be that a child has abnormal hearing or vision, in which case appropriate testing and correction measures would follow. Where no physiological disability seems apparent, a broad-based screening device would be used in order to narrow down the area or areas of the child's difficulty.  Some of these devices include:  The Iowa Test of Basic Skills (1978), the Stanford Achievement Test (1973), the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (1970), and the Woodcock-Johnson Psychoeducational Battery (1977).

Those students determined from the screening to require extra help would likely be given a diagnostic assessment in order to identify more specifically which areas need help, and in order to plan intervention and instruction programs for the child.  Usually a combination of formal and informal diagnoses are used.  For example, a student screened for reading difficulties would be given a group of diagnostic reading tests, such as the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests (1973), which consist of a number of subtests (letter identification, word identification, word attack, word comprehension, passage comprehension).  This same student might also have some informal assessments done.  The most common of these for reading would be an informal reading inventory(IRI).  An IRI uses graded word lists and reading passages to establish a student's independent, instructional, and frustration levels of reading.  The idea is to teach this student using materials that are neither too hard (frusteration) nor too easy (independent).

Once a diagnosis has been done, and a program put in place, a student's progress must be monitored.  Progress monitoring should not only occur in the Fall and the Spring of each year.  Frequent, short monitoring should occur throughout the year.