LEARNING DISABILITIES Characteristics of Learning Disabilities and Strategies to Teach Individuals with LD Benchmark Assessment



Characteristics of Learning Disabilities and Strategies to Teach Individuals with LD Benchmark Assessment

Introduction

Learning disability affects the child's daily functioning, prevents educational development, and substantially interferes with his ability to learn. The current view on the disability tends to lean toward an approach that recognizes it as part of the human psychological development. Learning disabilities fall on a continuum and range in severity from subtle to marked impairment. Learning disabilities differ from learning problems (which are less severe) and from intellectual disabilities. Some children are naturally slower than others in developing certain skills, but most children typically catch up and achieve within the normal range for their age and abilities (Aylward, 2002). Several authors have presented differing definitions to explain the fundamentals of learning disabilities.

Learning Disability - Definition

The U.S. government defines learning disability as a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or use of spoken or written language, which may be manifest as an inability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or do mathematic calculations (Aylward, 2002).

Miranda Ferrara (2010) defined learning disabilities as disorders that affect people's ability to interpret information that they see or hear or to link information processed in different parts of the brain.

These two definitions provide an interrelated concept to explain the fundamental problems of learning disabilities. The definition could include the conditions of perceptual handicaps, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia, it is not applicable to students whose learning problems are the result of visual, hearing, or motor handicaps, psychological retardation, emotional disturbance, or environmental/cultural disadvantage (Aylward, 2002).

Information Processing

Information processing is similar to a normal person in individuals with learning disabilities. They follow a sequential path to derive meaning from the information or object of focus. This involves decoding of information received from the external environment through visual senses, auditory, tactile, or kinesthetic. Association of preconceived factors to the information results in executive processing of information to derive meaning from the information piece (Strickland, 2001). Action of motor neurons on the information result in verbal or written action to define the reaction to information received. The most important cognitive processes involved in language learning are: perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and motivation among others that they interact with a common goal: to capture, transform and manipulate or represent the information extracted from medium (Silver, 2003).

Main challenges to the information processing by individuals having a learning disability include:

Main challenges that affect the information processing capacity of learning disability individuals is how does external factor impact them. This is a dynamic process in which the individual performs a set of mental operations and procedures that allow him to process the information it receives and deriving comparable meaning with the same efficiency. Memory and schemas, characteristic of active sensor and motor neurons, cognitive processing speed highly affect the information processing by learning disability individual (Rourke, 1999).

Aggression, strange behavior, and low performance in schools specify ...