Local teachers and other school personnel in Hawaii expressed a need for operational guidelines to use in deciding whether or not to refer students for diagnostic evaluations for specific learning disabilities (SLD). This project was designed to evaluate whether the Windward Rating Scale (WRS), a locally-developed teacher rating scale of student behavior, could be used as a screening tool in the referral process. Teacher ratings of 720 SLD-certified and non-special education students in grades K-6 were obtained and analyzed. Psychometric properties and diagnostic efficiency of the WRS were examined. The WRS was able to accurately classify 78 percent of the students in a discriminant classification analysis, with 83 percent accuracy obtained using selected cutoff scores. Implications of the evaluation results for both theoretical and applied issues are discussed. (Author)