Laura Spenceley

Laura Spenceley, an assistant professor of counseling and psychological services, explores learning disabilities, their diagnosis, and improving the validity of diagnosis an intervention.

"I'm working on exploring whether adding an objective method of effort into an evaluation can help to identify individuals who are attempting to fake a learning impairment to try to gain some kind of advantage," Spenceley said. "We are obviously dedicated to supporting students with very real learning disabilities, but with the high-stakes nature of standardized tests like the ACT and SAT, there has been an increasing concern about a subset of learners who may try to manipulate the system."

The research recently earned a $1,000 grant from the New York Association of School Psychologists to conduct a pilot study on campus. "I'll be recruiting students to assist in all aspects of the project, from data collection and scoring, to analyzing results, to presenting findings, given the campus initiative to promote student-faculty collaboration," Spenceley said.

Spenceley comes to Oswego with a Ph.D. in school psychology  from Syracuse University and master's in clinical psychology, from Ball State University.