Learning Disabilities

"A Specific Learning Disability is a disorder in one or more of the central nervous system processes involved in perceiving, understanding and/or using concepts through spoken/written language or nonverbal means. This disorder manifests itself with a deficit in one or more of the following areas: attention, reasoning, processing, memory, communication, reading, writing, spelling, calculation, coordination, social competence, and emotional maturity: (Rehabilitation Services Administration, 1985). While specific learning disabilities may affect any of these areas, deficiencies are usually limited to only one or two areas."

Students with specific learning disabilities may exhibit some of the following characteristics (Corn, 1989):

• Slow information processing skills
• Inconsistent performance
• Difficulty recalling information
• Test anxiety
• Time disorientation
• Disorganization
• Impaired notetaking skills
• Poor study skills
• Difficulty following directions
• Limited vocabulary
• Confusion of mathematical symbols
• Difficulty shifting from one task to another
• Poor handwriting, letter and number formation
• Difficulty aligning numbers
• Limited strategies for monitoring errors

Despite learning problems, students with learning disabilities still have a number of talents and gifts. With support, motivation, and appropriate intervention, they can complete a college degree.

Educational Implications:
It is important to note the effects of a Specific Learning Disability on academic performance result from long-term retrieval, short-term memory, processing speed, auditory, visual, and/or other cognitive processing deficits. Students with these disabilities are not less intelligent than other students nor are they lazy.

The student with a Specific Learning Disability may exhibit problems in one or more of the following areas:

READING

Students may:

• Display slow reading rate and/or experience difficulty in modifying the reading rate in accordance with the difficulty of the material.
• Struggle with comprehension and retention of written material.
• Have difficulty in identifying important/relevant points or themes.
• Experience difficulty distinguishing between sounds.
• Encounter difficulties mastering phonics.
• Confuse similar words, and have difficulty integrating new vocabulary.
• Encounter poor tracking skills resulting in skipped words, phrases or lines or losing place on the page.
• Written Language

Students may:

• Have difficulty with sentence structure resulting in incomplete sentences, inappropriate use of grammar, missing inflectional endings, and frequent spelling errors.
• Transpose of letters, making words and sentences jumbled or unclear
• Omit or substitute sounds, especially in unfamiliar vocabulary
• Have difficulty copying correctly from written information, poor penmanship or poorly formed letters
• Have trouble with capitalization and/or spacing in paper preparation

ORAL LANGUAGE

Students may:

• Encounter an inability to concentrate on and comprehend oral language
• Have difficulty expressing ideas orally and/or sequencing events properly
• Exhibit difficulty in managing more than one task at a time
• Experiences difficulty retaining a list of information
• Possess an inability to distinguish between sounds or a combination of sounds

MATHEMATICS

Students may:

• Have difficulty mastering basic facts that underlie other operations; can hinder math comprehension and computation if unaddressed
• Experience problems with number reversals
• Confuse operational signals.
• Have difficulty recalling the sequence of operational processes
• Experience difficulty understanding and retaining abstract concepts
• Exhibit poor comprehension of word problems and limited understanding of ratio, proportions or relative size
• Encounter reasoning deficits and inability to eliminate irrelevant data in applied problems

ORGANIZATION

Students may:

• Have difficulty managing time effectively
• Have a tendency to work slowly, rush through work carelessly, or impulsively start before listening to or reading instructions
• Experience an inability to identify key points in a lecture or chapter
• Have a short attention span.

Accommodations and Instructional Techniques:

• Encourage students, at the beginning of each semester, to discuss modifications that will facilitate their learning
• Provide a detailed course syllabus
• Announce reading assignments well in advance
• Begin lectures and/or discussion with written and oral overview of topics to be covered
• Use board, overhead projector, or handouts to highlight key concepts when lecturing
• Make statements that emphasize important points, main ideas, and key concepts when lecturing
• Provide all assignments in oral and written format; be available for further clarification
• Provide a study guide for text and encourage study groups, peer tutoring, and study labs; prepare study questions for review sessions.
• Accept oral presentations or tape recordings in place of written assignments
• Encourage use of accommodations recommended by the DSS such as notetakers, tape or video recording of lectures/demonstrations, readers for exams, extra time for exams, and oral rather than written exams
• Consider an alternative test environment which eliminates distractions