Learning Disabilities and Learning Disorders

If you have a learning disorder, it means that for someone who is as smart as you, you are especially bad at something.  Here are three examples which should explain what this is and what it is not.

Doug is 8 years old.  He can not read.  He knows his letters, but still is stuck at a grade 1 level in reading.  He also is poor in math.  He is more clumsy than most children his age.  He has a limited vocabulary.  His memory is not that good.  His printing is very poor.  There is nothing that Doug does which is up to what a person would expect of an 8 year old boy.  He has always been behind, and he is a very slow learner.

This is the profile one sees in mental retardation.  That is, Doug is poor at reading, but he is no worse at reading than he is at everything else.  I would not say that Doug has a learning disorder

Christian is also 8.  He can not read either.  He knows his letters, but when he reads he reads backwards, skips lines, and can't seem to understand how words are organized on the page.  He is good in math, loves to build things, is a good drawer, has a good vocabulary and is on two sports teams.

Christian has a learning disorder in reading.  He is of overall average intelligence and his reading is much worse than what you would expect of a person who is of average intelligence.

Karen is also 8.  She can not read in school, however her mom swears she can at home.  She knows the letters and sounds, but doesn't pay attention to what she is doing and gives up.  She has a hard time paying attention to other things, too.  She is interested in horses.  Once she found a book about horses that she was very interested in reading, she read it without problem and shocked her teacher.

Karen has Attention Deficit Disorder.  Although some children have ADD and a learning disorder, she just has ADD.  That is, she has no problem reading, if she can pay attention.

In a class room all three of these children can not read, but only one has a learning disorder.  I could have cited many more causes of not reading which are not learning disabilities.  Perhaps the most obvious other cause is not being able to see properly.  Here is the clinical definition of a learning disorder.  I will use reading as an example, but I could also use writing, math, coordination or memory.

a. Reading skills, as measured by an individually administered test, is substantially below that which is expected, given the person's chronological age, measured intelligence, and age-appropriate education.

b. The disturbance in reading significantly interferes with academic achievement or activities of daily living that require reading

c. If a sensory deficit is present ( hearing loss, vision problems) the learning difficulty is in excess of what one would expect.

The learning disorders are grouped by skills.  That is there is a learning disorder for each of the major skills.  There is a Developmental Reading Disorder, A developmental Mathematics Disorder, a developmental disorder of written expression, and a developmental coordination disorder.  There are also language disorders which follow the same pattern.

Learning disabilities are the basic brain functions which are abnormal in a child with a learning disorder.  A learning disability is what makes up a learning disorder.  A learning Disorder is what you see is wrong from the outside.  You see a child that can not read, write, do math, or run properly.  The best way to understand this is to see what the learning disabilities are.  To understand this, you have to know a little bit about how we currently think people use their brains to learn.

To learn something a number of things need to happen.  Problems at any level can lead to a learning disability.  Here are the steps in the usual order.  If the brain ins not functioning correctly at any of these steps, we call it a learning disability.

If you can't pay attention to something, you are not going to be able to learn.  This learning disability has special status.  It is called Attention deficit Hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

We perceive things through our eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin.  If we do not perceive them correctly, we can't learn.  If you can not perceive the difference between a toothbrush and a comb, you can not learn to brush your teeth.  There can be problems at different levels of perception.  For hearing, the problem could be not hearing due to wax, ear infections, or damage to the ear.  It also could be a problem in distinguishing sounds such as the difference between "ch" and "sh".

The same can apply to vision.  A person may not see well because there is something wrong with their eyes, but another possibility is that their brain has a hard time things.  Other types of visual perception problems are not being able to tell what is in front and what is in back.  Another common one is not being able to figure out what is important and what is the background.  or distinguishing what is important from what is just backround.  If you can not tell a "p" from a "q", it is very hard to read.  If a "9" looks the same as a "6", math is very hard.  These are examples of visual perception problems.

Processing refers to the ability to filter out unimportant sounds and attend to what you want to.  For example, an Auditory processing problem might show up as an inability to focus on what the teacher is saying when other children are talking or someone is mowing a lawn outside the window.  A visual processing disorder might make it difficult to read and process the instructions on the board when there are other things written there.

Once you perceive something correctly, you need to do three things to make sense of it.  You must place it in the right order , understand what the context is (abstraction), and then join it with other perceptions and your old memories (organization).  You can have a learning problem with any of these things

What is the difference between "god" and "dog"?  The order of the letters.  Reading requires constant attention to what direction you are going.  Likewise many tasks such as math problems and computers require strict attention to ordering.  A child might know the days of the week, but not be able to say them in order.

How do you tell the meaning of the word "run"?  You need to know the rest of the sentence to know which of the many meanings apply.  People with this problem have difficulty with all the concepts which they can not see or hear.  Understanding geometry concepts is a good example.

To live and learn efficiently, different concepts need to be put in order or importance.  They have to be related to things we already know or else we can not "retrieve" them from our minds when we need them.  Without organization, the brain works like a messy room.  That is, you can't find anything that you are looking for and you get sidetracked by what you do find.

Long term memory is not effected in learning disabilities.  Short term memory can be.  Even if you finally understand how to measure the height of a tree using angles and a tape measure, it will do you no good if you can't recall it.  We all recall better when we repeat something over and over.  People with short term memory problems have to repeat things over and over until they finally have it stuck in their brain.  However, once it is "stuck" in their mind, it stays there.  Some people have auditory (hearing) memory problem.  They can't recall what they hear.  Others have visual (seeing) memory problems.  They can't recall what they see.

Just as it may be hard to get information into the brain accurately and efficiently, it can also be hard to get information out of the brain.  A common one is language problems where people can not speak is well as they should for their intelligence.  Others have horrible problems with the coordination of the small muscles of their hands which can cause problems like a learning disability for writing.  Others have trouble making their larger muscles coordinate.  They would be clumsy and have trouble with sports.