| What is a learning disability. Bright Tots - Information on child development - Autism information |
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| Learning Disability |
Children with a learning disability have difficulty in collecting, categorizing, and/or performing on verbal and nonverbal information. Generally, children with learning disabilities have trouble understanding or using written or spoken language. The difficulty is due to a neurological difference in brain structure or functioning. Learning disabilities are disorders that cause the brain to process information in a way that obstructs learning. Most children with learning disabilities have average, nearly-average, or above average intelligence. Untreated, learning disabilities can prevent a child from mastering the basics and damage self-esteem and self confidence with lifelong effects.
School is often the setting where a child’s learning disability first becomes apparent. Areas of you may notice problems are the following:
• language development and language skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing, and spelling)
• social studies
• mathematics
• social skills
• motor skills (fine motor skills, as well as coordination)
• cognitive development and memory
• attention and organization
• test-taking
However, their academic performance, as measured by standardized tests, is below what one would expect of someone of their intelligence, age, and grade level. Therefore, a person with a learning disability may score poorly on tests, but the low scores are due to a problem with learning, not to low intelligence.
Learning takes place in a series of interrelated steps. Information first has to be recorded in the brain (input). This information then has to be organized and understood (integration). Next, the integrated knowledge has to be stored, later to be retrieved (memory). Finally, one must be able to communicate information from the brain to people or to the environment (output).
Developmental Delay
Learning disabilities are developmental disabilities. Developmental delays can occur in all five areas of development or may just happen in one or more of those areas. Additionally, growth in each area of development is related to growth in the other areas. So if there is a difficulty in one area (e.g., speech and language), it is likely to influence development in other areas (e.g., social and emotional).
Child development refers to the process in which children go through changes in skill development during predictable time periods, called developmental milestones. A developmental delay occurs when a child does not reach these milestones by the expected time period. For example, if the normal range for learning to walk is between 9 and 15 months, and a 20-month-old child has still not begun walking, this would be considered a developmental delay.
Differences between a learning disability and a developmental delay
Ordinarily, an individual has a learning disability when there’s a considerable difference between intellectual ability and achievement. The person with a learning disability may have low or high intelligence; the child simply learns below intellectual capability because of a processing disorder.
A developmentally delayed child is one who is younger than five years old and who is behind schedule in attaining developmental milestones, but usually reaches the milestone, eventually. The developmentally disabled child has severe and long-lived physical or mental impairments that limit success in several major life areas, and this impairment begins in childhood. Developmental disabilities include mental retardation, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and autism. Low IQ is the largest characteristic of someone with mental retardation.
Individuals with a learning disability generally have average or above average intelligence, yet they often do not achieve at the same academic level as their peers. Weaker academic achievement, particularly in reading, written language, and math, is perhaps the most basic characteristics of a learning disability. Significant deficits often correlate in memory, awareness and understanding one's thinking and cognitive processes; and social skills as well. However they are not mentally handicapped; but cannot grasp information, and they must compensate for this disability.
Areas of Learning Difficulties
Reading: Individuals with a learning disability have difficulties in reading, decoding or recognizing words (e.g., letter/sound omissions, distinctions, substitutions, reversals) or comprehending them (e.g., recalling or knowing basic facts, main ideas, sequences, or themes). They also may lose their places while reading or reading in an uneven pace.
Another term used for reading disabilities is dyslexia. Dyslexia is best understood as a type of reading disability. During early childhood, children with dyslexia have difficulties learning spoken language. Later they have trouble decoding and spelling words and, consequently, are likely to experience comprehension problems also. A reading disability affects every aspect of an individual's life, from the early years of school when children learn to read, to later years when students are expected to read in order to learn specific content, and into the community, home, and workplace where every person needs to acquire and understand written information.
Written Language: Students with a learning disabilities exhibit problems in written language, handwriting, spelling, sentence structure, vocabulary usage, volume of information produced, and organization of written ideas. Many students also present difficulties in reading, writing, since both areas are language-based.
Math: Poor math achievement may appear in learning difficulties such as distinguishing numbers and copying shapes, recalling math facts, writing numbers legibly, and relating math terms to meaning. Other weak areas may include complex reasoning and awareness, including identifying, using, and lacks the knowledge of step-by-step problem-solving math procedures.
Memory: Some children with learning disabilities have defects in engaging memory. They have difficulty processing information so that it can be stored in long-term memory. Difficulties in functioning memory can lead to difficulties in long-term memory when a person needs to search for and retrieve knowledge.
Cognitive Process: Individuals with learning disabilities may have deficits with awareness of how one thinks and the perceiving what people are thinking. Many children with learning disabilities do not know many effective cognitive strategies for acquiring, processing, storing, demonstrating, and understanding of information.
Social and Behavioral Characteristics: Students with a learning disability may demonstrate social or behavioral challenges. Some exhibit fewer socially acceptable behaviors than peers, are unable to predict consequences for behaviors, misinterpret social cues, or are less likely to adapt their behavior to different social situations. Paired with academic shortcomings, this experience can lead to lowered self-worth and a feeling of incompetence.
Forms of Learning Disabilities
Input Disabilities: (Collecting Information): Information enters the brain through all five senses. With learning, the most important ones are visual and auditory. Input is a central process and does not refer to visual or knowledge; it refers to the process of recording information in the brain. Since input refers to how one sees, hears, or perceives the world, the description for this essential process is perception. Therefore, a child might have a visual perceptual or an auditory perceptual disability.
Visual Perception Disability: Children might have difficulty with subtle differences in position or in relationships. A child might reverse letters like “s” for “e” or “E” for “3” or reverse words like “saw” for “was.” He or she might confuse “d” and “b” and “p’ and “q.” A “3” might be rotated to look like an “in.” This confusion with spatial positioning might show up in written work, copying designs, or in doing tasks in which the eyes have to cue the hands as to what to do (i.e., visual motor tasks).
Types of visual perceptual problems are for example, when reading a page the child might skip words or jump lines. If a desk or table is cluttered he or she might have difficulty focusing on the appropriate task. Some children have trouble with depth perception and judging distances. The child might bump into things or fall off a chair. He or she might knock over a glass or container because the distance is misjudged and the hand gets there too soon. A final form of visual perceptual disabilities relates to doing tasks such as eye and hand coordination, like catching a ball, doing a puzzle, or using a hammer. The child will have difficulty with catching, hitting, kicking a ball or jumping rope.
Auditory Perception Disabilities: Some children have difficulty distinguishing slight differences in sounds. The child might appear to misunderstand what you are saying and, thus, respond incorrectly. Children might have difficulty with auditory comprehension. If there is background noise the child may not listen when you are speaking. They may be distracted by the background rather than listening to your words. It appears as if the child never pays attention. If you call his or her name first and get eye contact the problem may improve. Some children cannot process sound inputs as fast as normal. They have an auditory delay. If you speak at a normal pace they might miss part of what you are saying. You may find that you normally speak slower with them.
Integration Disabilities (Sorting Information): All of the information recorded in the brain has to be placed in sequence and understood. The ADD child might have difficulty in either area. For some the problems are greater with auditory inputs, for others visual inputs.
Sequencing Disabilities: The child has difficulty telling or writing a story; the sequence of thoughts or events is all mixed up; he or she may go from the middle to the end then to the start. You might write a 32 on the board but the child copies it as 23. Spelling errors may be noted; all of the letters are there, but in the wrong sequence.
Abstraction Disabilities: A child with this disability will have difficulty knowing meanings to words or phrases. The child might have difficulty with the difference between the words, “the dog” and “your dog.” In a language exercise by reading a story about a policeman a teacher will to discuss the policemen in the neighborhood. This child has difficulty going from the specific policeman in the story to the concept of policemen in general.
Memory Disabilities (Storing Information): Once information has been received and recorded in the brain and integrated, it has to be stored so that it can be retrieved later. There are two forms of memory, short-term and long-term. Short-term memory is that which you can hold onto as long as you are attending to it; (for example, getting a phone number from the information operator and holding it in your head until you dial it) but which is lost when not attending to it (someone interrupts you before you dial the number).
Long-term memory refers to information which has been repeated and stored so that it can be made available by just thinking about it (for example, your home address). A child might have a short-term or a long-term memory disability. This disability might be more for visual or for auditory information. For example, you might go over a spelling list or a math concept with a child and he or she seems to know it (he’s attending to it); yet, later you find that the child has lost it.
In contrast, he or she might remember things done weeks or months ago in great detail. A child with a short-term memory disability may have to go over something 10-15 times to learn it (make it long-term memory) whereas a child without this problem might be able to learn it in 3-5 repetitions.
Output Disabilities (Expressing Information): Information is communicated through words, language output or through muscle activities (writing, drawing, gesturing, etc.) motor output. Children might have one or both of these output disabilities.
Language Disabilities: There are two types of oral language, spontaneous language (we initiate a conversation) and demand language (someone asks a question). With spontaneous language one can organize thoughts and find the words before their spoken; with demand language one does all this as one speaks. Some children have a demand language disability. What is confusing is that when he or she speaks (spontaneous language) it sounds normal. When the same child is asked a question then they may talk aimlessly or have trouble finding the right words. If you have a child in class who seems to speak up when he or she wants to but refuses to answer any questions you ask, it is possible that he or she is not misbehaving but might have a demand language disability.
Motor Disabilities: A child might have difficulty using large groups of muscles (gross motor disability). This child may be clumsy, stumble, have trouble with walking, running, climbing, etc. Other children will have difficulty getting groups of muscles to act as a team (fine motor disability). For example, to write, you have to get the information from your brain to the many muscles of your dominant hand.
These muscles have to work in close coordination to produce written language. This child will have poor handwriting. The child may have a thought but has trouble writing it down on paper at the same rate.
School is often the setting where a child’s learning disability first becomes apparent. Areas of you may notice problems are the following:
• language development and language skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing, and spelling)
• social studies
• mathematics
• social skills
• motor skills (fine motor skills, as well as coordination)
• cognitive development and memory
• attention and organization
• test-taking
However, their academic performance, as measured by standardized tests, is below what one would expect of someone of their intelligence, age, and grade level. Therefore, a person with a learning disability may score poorly on tests, but the low scores are due to a problem with learning, not to low intelligence.
Learning takes place in a series of interrelated steps. Information first has to be recorded in the brain (input). This information then has to be organized and understood (integration). Next, the integrated knowledge has to be stored, later to be retrieved (memory). Finally, one must be able to communicate information from the brain to people or to the environment (output).
Developmental Delay
Learning disabilities are developmental disabilities. Developmental delays can occur in all five areas of development or may just happen in one or more of those areas. Additionally, growth in each area of development is related to growth in the other areas. So if there is a difficulty in one area (e.g., speech and language), it is likely to influence development in other areas (e.g., social and emotional).
Child development refers to the process in which children go through changes in skill development during predictable time periods, called developmental milestones. A developmental delay occurs when a child does not reach these milestones by the expected time period. For example, if the normal range for learning to walk is between 9 and 15 months, and a 20-month-old child has still not begun walking, this would be considered a developmental delay.
Differences between a learning disability and a developmental delay
Ordinarily, an individual has a learning disability when there’s a considerable difference between intellectual ability and achievement. The person with a learning disability may have low or high intelligence; the child simply learns below intellectual capability because of a processing disorder.
A developmentally delayed child is one who is younger than five years old and who is behind schedule in attaining developmental milestones, but usually reaches the milestone, eventually. The developmentally disabled child has severe and long-lived physical or mental impairments that limit success in several major life areas, and this impairment begins in childhood. Developmental disabilities include mental retardation, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and autism. Low IQ is the largest characteristic of someone with mental retardation.
Individuals with a learning disability generally have average or above average intelligence, yet they often do not achieve at the same academic level as their peers. Weaker academic achievement, particularly in reading, written language, and math, is perhaps the most basic characteristics of a learning disability. Significant deficits often correlate in memory, awareness and understanding one's thinking and cognitive processes; and social skills as well. However they are not mentally handicapped; but cannot grasp information, and they must compensate for this disability.
Areas of Learning Difficulties
Reading: Individuals with a learning disability have difficulties in reading, decoding or recognizing words (e.g., letter/sound omissions, distinctions, substitutions, reversals) or comprehending them (e.g., recalling or knowing basic facts, main ideas, sequences, or themes). They also may lose their places while reading or reading in an uneven pace.
Another term used for reading disabilities is dyslexia. Dyslexia is best understood as a type of reading disability. During early childhood, children with dyslexia have difficulties learning spoken language. Later they have trouble decoding and spelling words and, consequently, are likely to experience comprehension problems also. A reading disability affects every aspect of an individual's life, from the early years of school when children learn to read, to later years when students are expected to read in order to learn specific content, and into the community, home, and workplace where every person needs to acquire and understand written information.
Written Language: Students with a learning disabilities exhibit problems in written language, handwriting, spelling, sentence structure, vocabulary usage, volume of information produced, and organization of written ideas. Many students also present difficulties in reading, writing, since both areas are language-based.
Math: Poor math achievement may appear in learning difficulties such as distinguishing numbers and copying shapes, recalling math facts, writing numbers legibly, and relating math terms to meaning. Other weak areas may include complex reasoning and awareness, including identifying, using, and lacks the knowledge of step-by-step problem-solving math procedures.
Memory: Some children with learning disabilities have defects in engaging memory. They have difficulty processing information so that it can be stored in long-term memory. Difficulties in functioning memory can lead to difficulties in long-term memory when a person needs to search for and retrieve knowledge.
Cognitive Process: Individuals with learning disabilities may have deficits with awareness of how one thinks and the perceiving what people are thinking. Many children with learning disabilities do not know many effective cognitive strategies for acquiring, processing, storing, demonstrating, and understanding of information.
Social and Behavioral Characteristics: Students with a learning disability may demonstrate social or behavioral challenges. Some exhibit fewer socially acceptable behaviors than peers, are unable to predict consequences for behaviors, misinterpret social cues, or are less likely to adapt their behavior to different social situations. Paired with academic shortcomings, this experience can lead to lowered self-worth and a feeling of incompetence.
Forms of Learning Disabilities
Input Disabilities: (Collecting Information): Information enters the brain through all five senses. With learning, the most important ones are visual and auditory. Input is a central process and does not refer to visual or knowledge; it refers to the process of recording information in the brain. Since input refers to how one sees, hears, or perceives the world, the description for this essential process is perception. Therefore, a child might have a visual perceptual or an auditory perceptual disability.
Visual Perception Disability: Children might have difficulty with subtle differences in position or in relationships. A child might reverse letters like “s” for “e” or “E” for “3” or reverse words like “saw” for “was.” He or she might confuse “d” and “b” and “p’ and “q.” A “3” might be rotated to look like an “in.” This confusion with spatial positioning might show up in written work, copying designs, or in doing tasks in which the eyes have to cue the hands as to what to do (i.e., visual motor tasks).
Types of visual perceptual problems are for example, when reading a page the child might skip words or jump lines. If a desk or table is cluttered he or she might have difficulty focusing on the appropriate task. Some children have trouble with depth perception and judging distances. The child might bump into things or fall off a chair. He or she might knock over a glass or container because the distance is misjudged and the hand gets there too soon. A final form of visual perceptual disabilities relates to doing tasks such as eye and hand coordination, like catching a ball, doing a puzzle, or using a hammer. The child will have difficulty with catching, hitting, kicking a ball or jumping rope.
Auditory Perception Disabilities: Some children have difficulty distinguishing slight differences in sounds. The child might appear to misunderstand what you are saying and, thus, respond incorrectly. Children might have difficulty with auditory comprehension. If there is background noise the child may not listen when you are speaking. They may be distracted by the background rather than listening to your words. It appears as if the child never pays attention. If you call his or her name first and get eye contact the problem may improve. Some children cannot process sound inputs as fast as normal. They have an auditory delay. If you speak at a normal pace they might miss part of what you are saying. You may find that you normally speak slower with them.
Integration Disabilities (Sorting Information): All of the information recorded in the brain has to be placed in sequence and understood. The ADD child might have difficulty in either area. For some the problems are greater with auditory inputs, for others visual inputs.
Sequencing Disabilities: The child has difficulty telling or writing a story; the sequence of thoughts or events is all mixed up; he or she may go from the middle to the end then to the start. You might write a 32 on the board but the child copies it as 23. Spelling errors may be noted; all of the letters are there, but in the wrong sequence.
Abstraction Disabilities: A child with this disability will have difficulty knowing meanings to words or phrases. The child might have difficulty with the difference between the words, “the dog” and “your dog.” In a language exercise by reading a story about a policeman a teacher will to discuss the policemen in the neighborhood. This child has difficulty going from the specific policeman in the story to the concept of policemen in general.
Memory Disabilities (Storing Information): Once information has been received and recorded in the brain and integrated, it has to be stored so that it can be retrieved later. There are two forms of memory, short-term and long-term. Short-term memory is that which you can hold onto as long as you are attending to it; (for example, getting a phone number from the information operator and holding it in your head until you dial it) but which is lost when not attending to it (someone interrupts you before you dial the number).
Long-term memory refers to information which has been repeated and stored so that it can be made available by just thinking about it (for example, your home address). A child might have a short-term or a long-term memory disability. This disability might be more for visual or for auditory information. For example, you might go over a spelling list or a math concept with a child and he or she seems to know it (he’s attending to it); yet, later you find that the child has lost it.
In contrast, he or she might remember things done weeks or months ago in great detail. A child with a short-term memory disability may have to go over something 10-15 times to learn it (make it long-term memory) whereas a child without this problem might be able to learn it in 3-5 repetitions.
Output Disabilities (Expressing Information): Information is communicated through words, language output or through muscle activities (writing, drawing, gesturing, etc.) motor output. Children might have one or both of these output disabilities.
Language Disabilities: There are two types of oral language, spontaneous language (we initiate a conversation) and demand language (someone asks a question). With spontaneous language one can organize thoughts and find the words before their spoken; with demand language one does all this as one speaks. Some children have a demand language disability. What is confusing is that when he or she speaks (spontaneous language) it sounds normal. When the same child is asked a question then they may talk aimlessly or have trouble finding the right words. If you have a child in class who seems to speak up when he or she wants to but refuses to answer any questions you ask, it is possible that he or she is not misbehaving but might have a demand language disability.
Motor Disabilities: A child might have difficulty using large groups of muscles (gross motor disability). This child may be clumsy, stumble, have trouble with walking, running, climbing, etc. Other children will have difficulty getting groups of muscles to act as a team (fine motor disability). For example, to write, you have to get the information from your brain to the many muscles of your dominant hand.
These muscles have to work in close coordination to produce written language. This child will have poor handwriting. The child may have a thought but has trouble writing it down on paper at the same rate.
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