Learning Disabilities

Children and adults classified with learning disabilities (LD) are individuals of normal intelligence, but they suffer with mental information processing difficulties. Several definitions refer to persons with LD as reflecting a heterogeneous group of individuals with intrinsic disorders that are manifested by specific difficulties in the acquisition and use of listening, speaking, reading, writing, reasoning, or mathematical abilities. Most definitions assume that the learning difficulties of such individuals are:

• Not related to inadequate opportunities to learn, general intelligence, or significant physical or emotional disorders. The basic disorders are linked to specific psychological processes (such as remembering the association between sounds and letters).
• Not related to poor instruction, but to specific psychological processing problems. These problems have a neurological, constitutional, and/or biological base.
• Not manifested in all aspects of learning. Such individuals’ psychological processing deficits depress only a limited aspect of academic behavior. For example, such individuals may suffer problems in reading, but not arithmetic.

Depending upon the definition, the incidence of children with LD is conservatively estimated to reflect 2% of the public school population. It is also the largest category of children served in special education.

[Page 290]The term learning disability was first coined in a speech that Samuel Kirk delivered in 1963 at the Chicago Conference on Children with Perceptual Handicaps. Clinical studies prior to 1963 showed that a group of children who suffered perceptual, memory, and attention difficulties related to their poor academic performance, but who were not intellectually retarded, were not being adequately served in the educational context.

Lee Wiederholt in reviewing the history of the LD field noted that its unique focus was on identifying and remediating specific psychological processing difficulties. Popular intervention approaches during the 1960s and 1970s focused on visual–motor, auditory sequencing, or visual perception training exercises. Several criticisms were directed at these particular interventions on methodological and theoretical grounds.

By the late 1970s, dissatisfaction with a processing orientation to remediation of LDs, as well as the influence of federal regulations (Public Law 94–142), led to remediation programs focused on basic skills such as reading and mathematics. The focus on basic skills rather than psychological processes was referred to as direct instruction. The mid-1980s witnessed a shift from the more remedial-academic approach of teaching to instruction that included both basic skills and cognitive strategies (ways to better learn new information and efficiently access information from long-term memory). Children with LDs were viewed as experiencing difficulty in regulating their learning performance. An instructional emphasis was placed on teaching students to check, plan, monitor, test, revise, and evaluate their learning.

The early 1990s witnessed a resurgence of direct instruction intervention studies, primarily influenced by reading research, which suggested that a primary focus of intervention should be directed to phonological skills. The rationale was that because a large majority of children with LD suffer problems in reading, some of these children's reading problems are exacerbated because of lack of systematic instruction in processes related to phonological awareness (the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words and understand the sound structure of language). This view gave rise to interventions that focused heavily on phonics instruction, and intense individual one-to-one tutoring to improve children's phonological awareness of word structures and sequences.

...