Category: Learning Disability

ADHD, Learning Disability

Detection and Intervention for Childhood Learning Disabilities

Psychological Assessment Center Of Toronto

While the prevalence of disorders such as ADHD and autism among children is relatively well understood and documented, the same cannot be said about learning disabilities. Unlike attention deficit disorder where a person lacks concentration or Autism where a person exhibits ritualistic behaviors, obsession with certain ideas, or has lower social skills, learning disabilities merely hamper a person’s ability to process information. This could be associate with having difficulty following directions, finding it difficult to process visual information, having trouble reading and writing, or an inability to understand mathematical concepts. This is not linked to a person’s intelligence of the environment, and is a neurological condition that children are born with ().

Common Learning Disabilities

The three most common learning disabilities are Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, and Dyscalculia. Of these, Dyslexia is the most common(). This learning disability accounts for 80% of the diagnosis and is associated with an inability or difficulty to read and interpret words, symbols etc. It should be noted that the people suffering from this condition are otherwise intelligent, motivated, and possess the necessary training to read and write (). Children suffering from this disability may also struggle with similar sounding words and can have trouble with pronunciations.

Dysgraphia is associated with the ability to write rather than read. Children with this disability usually lack the fine motor skills associated with writing and find it a tiring process. This is also associated with poor writing posture, bad handwriting, inability to space words equally, and poor spatial planning.

Dyscalculia similarly is an inability to understand maths. This disability may vary from person to person and may range from a child being unable to avoid numbers correctly to someone being able to approach a problem only in a limited number of ways. In addition to these, children can also exhibit Dyspraxia, which is about a general lack of coordination and motor skills, resulting in the child being called ‘Clumsy’. In addition, children with certain learning difficulties may simply have trouble processing visual or auditory information.

Diagnosis of Learning Disability

Diagnosing a learning disability is the first step to providing a child with the support necessary to manage his/her condition. It is essential to get a trained professional such as a psychologist to assess any child exhibiting trouble with any kind of learning, lacks social skills, and is often termed as disruptive in a classroom. Symptoms are usually noted by teachers in lower classes, and the school psychologist, trained in education and psychology; has a critical role to play in appropriately identifying the students who need assistance with their learning disability. In many schools, a team of professionals including a psychologist, a special education expert, and a speech-language pathologist work together to identify the difficulty involved (). A number of tests including those measuring intelligence, visual and motor skills, and language abilities can also aid in the diagnosis of learning disabilities. However, test results themselves are not sufficient to provide an appropriate diagnosis. These tests, along with interviews and observations, can aid a team of experts to assess whether a child is suffering from a specific learning disability.

Early Intervention for Learning Disability

Studies show that children with learning disabilities are no less intelligent than their peers. However, it is also noted that these children, if not supported during the initial few years of school, can develop a long term ‘learning gap’ that continues through school days, making them less likely to drop out or fail critical educational milestones (). However, the good news is that this can be avoided through early intervention. The same study by Ferrer et al.(2015) also shows that if appropriate support is provided in early years when the child is still developing the concerned skill (such as reading), then this gap can be significantly reduced. This can be done by developing a personalised education program for students with learning disability and providing them with the necessary tools and skills.This could also be in the form of out of school training and therapy. Whatever the method, in order to allow for early intervention, parents have to be educated about learning difficulties and capable of advocating for their child. With an appropriate diagnosis and early intervention, any child with learning disabilities can reach his/her full potential ().

Wong, B. (Ed.). (2011). Learning about learning disabilities. Elsevier.

Ferrer, E., Shaywitz, B. A., Holahan, J. M., Marchione, K. E., Michaels, R., &Shaywitz, S. E. (2015). Achievement gap in reading is present as early as first grade and persists through adolescence. The Journal of pediatrics, 167(5), 1121-1125.

Learning Disability, PSYCHOLOGICAL

Classifications of the Disorders Picked In Reading Disability Assessment

Psychological Assessment Center Of Toronto

In the past, those with learning difficulties were mocked and generally suffered a great deal of emotional stress. Moreover, few learning institutions were well-equipped to accommodate them. Though widely accepted nowadays, few people still do not understand what entails reading disabilities. In the past, they were loosely defined as discrepancies between a leaner’s intellectual aptitude and achievement despite an adequate learning opportunity in the absence of cultural deprivation or sensory difficulties. Nowadays, however, psychologists conduct a reading disability assessment to classify the issues affecting a learner and chart the ideal path to help him/her achieve academic success. The following are the classifications of reading disorders.

Word Decoding Deficit

This is the most common type of reading disorder. Here, the person generally has difficulty in sounding written words then matching them to make words. Word decoding issues usually point to a core problem with a student’s phonological processing system. This causes someone to have challenges in decoding words efficiently and quickly. The result is poor fluency, affected comprehension, and slow decoding.

Lack of Fluency

This affects people with normal phonological processing skills. They nonetheless have challenges in formulating inferences, summaries, and ideas. This difficulty will be evidenced in reading disability assessment when listening to or reading texts. A lack of fluency generally points to orthographic or processing speed deficits.

Comprehension Deficits

People with comprehension deficits have both a lack of fluency and word decoding deficits. As such, they are, at times, referred to as double-deficit patients. They have affected logical thinking and abstract reasoning, vocabulary weakness, and general trouble grasping the concepts they read.

Nowadays, a reading disability assessment is not confined to students who fall into one of the categories. It is also conducted on people suffering from alexia. These are patients who were at one point able to read but lost this ability after a brain injury or stroke.

Learning Disability, PSYCHOLOGICAL

Adolescent Learning Disabilities and “Setting Demands” in the Secondary School Context

Psychological Assessment Center Of Toronto

Most people who look back over their high school education experience likely do so with mixed feelings. Aside from the hormonal and social anxieties of that period, the memories of being forced to learn, through tedious classrooms and boring textbooks is almost universal. For most people, the experience is then shrugged off as a rite of passage as we move into adulthood. But for adolescents who experience serious problems with learning and who are given the label of being learning disabled (LD), this becomes just more handicap that they are forced to carry well into their adult lives.

Learning disabilities for people of any age can never – and should never – be dismissed with a blanket cause, like poverty or even dyslexia. There are usually numerous contributing factors, which far from being a bad thing, opens up the possibilities for partial reparation. Partial reparation can sometimes lead to a tipping point, in which afflicted individuals discover sufficient abilities and esteem to pull themselves further ahead.

Researchers Edwin Ellis and Patricia Friend offer some compelling insight into the inadequacy of high-school education and in particular textbooks, in their essay, Adolescents with Learning Disabilities, featured in Bernice Wong’s authoritative compendium, Learning About Learning Disabilities, (1991, Academic Press).

Ellis and Friend point out the procedural vacuum that exists as a child becomes an adolescent regardless of their level of learning ability. Elementary school is highly structured, with students given guidance over their time, and with the curriculum dedicated to the mechanical tasks of learning how to read, write and do basic math. Once they move into the secondary school environment, they face a culture in which they are expected to immediately use these skills and apply them to more abstract concepts. This expectation is a term that Ellis and Friend describe as “setting demands.”

They highlight textbook reading as a major setting demand:

For example, task demands associated with textbook reading include identifying main ideas, monitoring comprehension, sorting out relevant from irrelevant information, interpreting visual aids, and so on. In most secondary settings, students are expected to meet these task demands while independently reading textbooks.[1]

This shift, in which a young student must detect the unspoken demand and then assume the responsibility for answering it, while under considerable time pressure of assignment deadlines appears as a major impediment to learning. Ellis and Friend go on to point out that the consequences of this vacuum are further amplified by three confounding variables:

1. The nature of the textbook materials themselves being, as they put it, “poorly written.”[2]

2. Environmental factors such as lectures and teaching styles that are vague and disorganized.

3. A student’s own capacity to use skills of deduction and interpretation in league with the mechanical skills they have been taught.

As difficult as it may be for any student to successfully navigate these uncharted waters, adolescents with learning disabilities suffer further. Among their challenges, Ellis and Friend highlight:

●        Lacking the basic academic skills necessary to meet academic demands.

They highlight research that shows learning disabled adolescents in seventh grade generally read at a third-grade level, while twelfth-grade learners read at a fourth-grade level.

●        Failing to systematically use learned skills in problem-solving situations.

This points out the inability to carry across a learned skill such as adding numbers to a situation in which the need to do so must be extrapolated from the text.

●        Not using effective or efficient learning or performance strategies.

This comprises, for example, the abilities to effectively prepare for a test (determining what needs to be studied, then using sample tests and flashcards, self-checking correct/incorrect responses), as well as understanding how to apply and summon that knowledge in the pressure-filled context of an exam.[3]

In short, Ellis and Friend point out that many adolescents with learning disabilities simply do not possess the semantic capacity to retain and apply learned material in the semi-autonomous context that secondary school imposes upon them. These challenges fall into just one of four categories identified as posing serious challenges to this type of student. They are academic demands, with the other three categories being, social (community), motivational (internal) and executive (external).

As with much we discuss in this series, neither the causes of learning disabilities, nor their treatments and cures are simple. They require close personal attention and diagnosis, factoring internal physiological causes with a range of external environmental influences.

It is interesting to discover, however, the profundity of this setting standards gap. The amount of contextual interpretation an adolescent student is expected to instinctively pick up on is quite shocking when looked back upon from an adult perspective. Rather than dismiss such discoveries as merely pandering to the “sticker generation,” as some are inclined to do, it reveals instead a particular hindsight that can only come from research. This type of academic knowledge simply didn’t exist a generation or two ago.

The potential for some degree of success lies with modifications to the pedagogy system itself, using artificial intelligence and internet-access to deliver a teaching and assessment style that fits and moves with each learner. This is something that is only now becoming possible, after centuries of command-and-control classroom-style education.