Learning Disorders, Biology of

[Page 944]Learning involves a highly complex neurobiological process that requires individuals to coordinate a wide variety of lower order and higher order cognitive functions in the service of acquiring knowledge, skills, or strategies that are used to produce a contextually meaningful outcome. This dynamic cognitive process is often conceptualized in terms of the interplay between the input demands, processing demands, and output demands associated with a particular academic task. An individual who presents with deficits at a point in this cognitive sequence of events will have difficulties performing the task.

Learning disorders are generally understood to be neurologically based processing problems that manifest as persistent difficulties reaching developmentally appropriate levels of academic proficiency in reading, written expression, and/or mathematics. Although research has demonstrated that learning disorders ...