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.
PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT CENTER OF TORONTO 