Chapter 5: Learning Disabilities

It is not uncommon for a child to struggle at times to learn various academic skills in reading, writing or math. Usually, these difficulties can be overcome with a little extra help from a tutor or with a few weeks of additional small group instruction from the classroom teacher. However, when these difficulties persist over time and the child continues to struggle despite targeted supplemental teaching and review, it might be an indication that the child has a learning disability.

The concept that a child could have average cognitive ability, but also have learning challenges in one or more academic areas, is still a relatively new idea. Samuel Kirk first publicly used the term “learning disability” in 1963 to describe this phenomenon (LDA, 2023). Prior to this, children with these types of struggles might be labeled as having “word blindness,” “minimal brain dysfunction,” or a “perceptual handicap.” Typically, these students did not receive any special educational services or, if they did, they were educated in classrooms for students with intellectual disabilities. As we gained a greater understanding of how the brain works and the learning challenges these students face, special educators began to develop programs to specifically address this need.

Definition

IDEA defines a specific learning disability as:

Specific learning disability means a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, that may manifest itself in the imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or to do mathematical calculations, including conditions such as perceptual disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia. Specific learning disability does not include learning problems that are primarily the result of visual, hearing, or motor disabilities, of intellectual disability, of emotional disturbance, or of environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage.

Research into the source of a learning disability has shown that it is a neurological disorder, specifically an information processing disorder (LD OnLine, 2024). The brain of the child with a learning disability is not damaged, but rather it processes information in a different manner than the brain of a child who does not have a learning disability. Brain studies show that information travels through the brain of a child with a learning disability along a less efficient path than the path it typically takes through the brain of a child without a learning disability. This longer, more laborious trip through the brain can negatively impact the learning outcome (Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2020).

Information processing refers to the cognitive process by which a learner discovers, uses, and remembers information. Information processing is intrinsic to the work of learning. This process can be broken down into five related skills: attention, memory, organization, metacognition, and processing speed. Attention is the ability of the learner to maintain focus on the area of interest while ignoring other distractions. As children grow and develop their abilities, they are able to sustain that attention for an increasing amount of time and even learn to shift attention between two or more targets of interest. Memory is the operation by which information from these learning targets is encoded and stored in the brain for later retrieval. Organization is the method of categorizing information that comes into the brain and connecting it to previously mastered knowledge. As learners develop better methods for organizing their thinking, they improve the efficiency with which they can store and retrieve this information. Metacognition is thinking about thinking. Metacognition is necessary for identifying the correct learning strategies to use for accomplishing a task and for monitoring one’s own learning. Finally, processing speed refers to how quickly a child can think. A child’s processing speed typically increases greatly during elementary and middle school before leveling off in late adolescence. Repeated practice of a skill will also improve processing speed, resulting in automaticity. All of these tasks are part of the cognitive activity of information processing. For the child with a learning disability, difficulties with certain types of academic learning are symptoms of their impairment in processing the corresponding types of information.

On a daily basis, we gather information about the world around us through our senses. This data is then sent to our brains, either to be used immediately or to be stored for future use. A person can have difficulties with processing information from any of their senses, but the two critical areas of information processing that have the greatest effect on academic success are visual processing and auditory processing. It is important to note that these difficulties are not the result of a hearing impairment or a visual impairment. Instead, these challenges are the result of inefficient processing of a particular type of information, in this case information perceived either auditorily or visually. This will be evidenced by skill difficulties when the student with a learning disability is asked to complete a task that relies on their abilities in the areas of discrimination, sequencing, or memory for either visual or auditory details, depending on which type of processing is affected. Some examples of these challenges include noticing and remembering the differences between similar letters of the alphabet, distinguishing the differences between similar phonetic sounds, remembering how to spell words that do not follow a regular pattern, and reversing the order of numbers, letters or words when completing reading, writing and math tasks.

Different parts of the brain are used to process these different types of input. When a child has a learning disability, the processing that occurs in the part of their brain corresponding to their disability is affected. The information moving through this part of the brain is slowed down or sidetracked, much like when there is a traffic jam on the road through town. You can avoid the traffic jam by taking a detour, but the detour is not usually as fast and efficient as your typical route. In the same way, for the child with a learning disability, some types of information will be learned rapidly and easily, while other types will “hit a traffic jam” and require much more time and effort to learn. This negative impact on how quickly a person can take in information and formulate a response is described as an impairment in processing speed. As illustrated by the traffic jam analogy, students with learning disabilities will experience processing speed difficulties when a task requires them to use the part of their brain affected by their disability. This is why extended time is not only an appropriate accommodation for a student with a learning disability, it is also the most common.

Prevalence

Estimates indicate that approximately 10% of people have a specific learning disability (Butterworth & Kovas, 2013). The most common is dyslexia, which impacts the process of learning to read. Many children with dyslexia also struggle with dysgraphia, difficulty with the skill of writing, and dysorthographia, difficulty with spelling. It is estimated that, overall, 5-15% of children and adults struggle with reading, writing, and spelling as a result of having dyslexia (LD OnLine, 2004/2024). The next most common academic learning disability is dyscalculia, or difficulty with math skills. Dyscalculia is not as well-known as dyslexia and it has not been as extensively researched; however, it is estimated that between 5-10% of people have dyscalculia (Understood, n.d.). The two disabilities are not mutually exclusive, and some students will have both dyslexia and dyscalculia. Remember that a critical piece of the definition of learning disability is that these learning challenges must not be due primarily to a visual, hearing, motor, or intellectual disability or to emotional disturbance or economic disadvantage.

A less well-known subcategory of learning disability is nonverbal learning disability. Some children have been identified as having a nonverbal learning disability due to their struggles with visual-spatial, organizational, and social skills. However, nonverbal learning disability is not an officially recognized disorder in the DSM-V and there is a lack of consensus amongst professionals as to whether this is a separate disorder. Professionals also do not have full agreement on the specific characteristics by which this disorder could be identified. IDEA does not identify nonverbal learning disability as a specific learning disability which meets eligibility requirements for special education; however, students who struggle with these nonverbal learning skills to such an extent that they demonstrate a need for special education services will sometimes also be identified as having other disabilities. This is because many of the characteristics of a nonverbal learning disability are also common to other disability areas. Thus, based on the impact of the learning difficulties exhibited by the child, he or she may be diagnosed with a different disability that is recognized under IDEA. For example, the child who struggles with organization might be diagnosed with ADHD, the child who struggles with visual-spatial skills might be diagnosed with a specific learning disability in math, and the child who struggles with social skills might be diagnosed with autism. Whether this is because nonverbal learning disability is highly comorbid with these other conditions or because these children are simply misdiagnosed is unclear at this time and more research is needed in this area (Burkhardt, 2019).

Identification

A learning disability is a life-long condition. However, receiving a diagnosis of a specific learning disability is not sufficient evidence for a child to qualify for special education. The child may have developed sufficient coping skills or may have received sufficient remediation to compensate for their disability and may not need special education to be able to make progress in the general education curriculum. In this situation, the child would no longer exhibit the severe discrepancy between their cognitive ability and their academic achievement that is necessary to qualify for special education under the discrepancy model. Most states now use a Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) model to identify students with a learning disability rather than a discrepancy model; however, it must be noted that a child will not qualify for special education under either model if he or she is making reasonable progress through the general education curriculum. Only if the child is falling behind academically, and targeted intervention has not been sufficient to remediate this situation, will a child with a learning disability qualify for special education services. It is also important to remember that while the discrepancy model is no longer mandated by IDEA, and has largely been replaced by the MTSS model, the discrepancy model can still be used. Under the discrepancy model, the child must have a significant difference between their achievement in one or more academic areas and the estimate of what that achievement should be based on assessments of their intelligence, generally an IQ test.

Research is ongoing into the causes of learning disabilities. Current studies are particularly looking at possible genetic links. Given the documented changes in how the brain of the person with a learning disability processes information, it does appear that heredity plays a role. Neuroimaging has consistently shown structural and functional differences, particularly in the left temporal lobe of the brain (Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2020). Anecdotally, many special educators have also noticed that learning disabilities often seem to run in families, which further supports the idea of a possible genetic link. Other factors that are correlated with learning disabilities include problems that can occur during pregnancy, the birth process, or childhood. Children who are born prematurely, have low birth weight, experience a lack of oxygen at birth, or whose mothers use drugs or alcohol during pregnancy, are more likely to exhibit learning disabilities. Nutritional deprivation or exposure to toxic substances such as lead during childhood can also contribute to learning disabilities. While there appears to be strong evidence for a genetic cause of learning disabilities, there are many preventable situations that can result in learning disabilities as well.

Learner Characteristics

Approximately one third of the students in special education have a learning disability. When we group together the students with specific learning disability and the students served under the category of Other Health Impairment, which includes children who have ADHD, that number approaches 50% of all children in special education. Most of these students will be referred for special education by a general education teacher, so clearly it is important for general education teachers to be aware of the signs. The promise of MTSS is that identification of these students can happen sooner than it has in the past, providing opportunity for early intervention for these students.

Signs of a potential learning disability include difficulty learning the letters of the alphabet and learning to connect letters to their corresponding sounds. This difficulty with learning the rules governing alphabetic sound-symbol correspondence, also known as phonological awareness, is thought to be at the root of dyslexia for many children (Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2020). This may first show up in young children as trouble with distinguishing rhyming words and producing rhymes. School-aged children with dyslexia may read slowly, hesitate, and repeat, omit, or substitute words when reading aloud. The student may also struggle with reading comprehension, possibly as a result of the dysfluency when reading or because of a failure to use metacognitive strategies to monitor understanding of what is being read. These students may also have messy handwriting, difficulty with spelling, and problems when required to express ideas in writing.

Some students with specific learning disabilities in math will struggle with basic math computation skills. Others may struggle with mathematical concepts such as spatial relationships, time, money, negative numbers, decimals, and fractions. Similar to the difficulties children with dyslexia have learning letters and connecting letters with their sounds, students with a math learning disability may misread numbers, get math symbols mixed up, and have trouble matching numbers to their quantities. This disability may first show up in young children as a difficulty with reproducing patterns and completing sequencing tasks (Frye, 2019). These students may also struggle with problem solving, which can have far reaching effects

A learning disability can be mistaken for a lack of motivation or an attention issue. The learning issues of a student with a learning disability are directly related to the processing issues discussed earlier in this chapter. As a result of the impact on the tasks involved in information processing, these students may not be allocating attention to the correct stimulus, not correctly encoding and organizing information for easy storage and retrieval from memory, not using good learning strategies and monitoring their learning, and not developing the automaticity that other learners develop through repeated practice. As a result, they may not hear slight differences between words or between letter sounds, may mispronounce or substitute words when reading, have trouble organizing their writing, not be able to put story elements into the correct sequence, and may fail to generalize their learning. Some children may have developed language late and have a limited vocabulary. These children can also have social skill difficulties, organizational challenges, and trouble following directions that looks similar to those experienced by children with ADHD, which is another reason learning disabilities can sometimes be mistaken for attention issues.

Strategies

Children with learning disabilities benefit from a structured program and clearly established expectations. This helps address some of the difficulties these children have with allocating attention, organizing information, and using metacognition. In a similar way, a well-organized classroom with consistent routines will increase the chances of success for this student. Even with these systems in place, the child with a learning disability may still need additional support with classroom related tasks such as keeping his or her desk, locker, backpack, and materials organized.

Multisensory instructional approaches are best for these students. Multisensory methods allow students to engage with the content through more than one modality, which increases the chances that the material will be correctly processed and learned. Rather than using an instructional method that relies on only one type of input, usually either auditory or visual, provide these students with both auditory and visual stimuli as well as opportunities to incorporate tactile input and movement. For example, children can work on learning letters by tracing them on sandpaper or on a shaving-cream covered tray. For math, provide students with manipulatives and draw pictures to accompany word problems. We will explore multisensory learning further in a later chapter.

In addition, these students should receive regular feedback so that correct learning is reinforced. For the best impact on learning, this feedback should be provided as soon after the student response as possible. It is helpful to remember that practice does not make perfect, rather practice makes permanent. That is, what is practiced repeatedly is what is remembered. We want to ensure that these students are practicing the correct responses so that they benefit from the practice. In addition to providing feedback, positive reinforcement can also help with student motivation and sense of accomplishment.

These students will benefit from direct instruction. This strategy involves explicit, step-by-step teaching with error correction and checks for mastery at each step. The teacher support should be gradually faded as students engage in repeated practice with increasingly varied examples. As new concepts are learned, previously acquired concepts are systematically reviewed for maintenance. Systematic instruction can be used to teach both academic and functional skills and is a research-based best practice for teaching students with learning disabilities. This strategy will also be explored in greater detail in a later chapter.

Students with learning disabilities also need instruction in metacognitive strategies as this is an area of weakness for many of these students. One example of a way to teach metacognition is to teach the student to use self-instruction to talk themselves through the steps for completing a task. Initially, the student may need the teacher to model the strategy and may simply repeat each self-instruction statement out loud following the verbal model provided by the teacher. In the next step, the teacher no longer provides the model statements. Now, the student takes over audibly making the self-instruction statements for him or herself, with the teacher prompting as needed. Finally, as the student develops competence with the skill, the self-instruction support can be faded from overt speech to whispering to covert speech. Self-questioning and self-monitoring are other useful metacognitive strategies that students can learn to use (Iris Center, 2017).

Instruction in the use of other learning strategies will also benefit these students. Any method that can help the student actively engage with the material, systematically plan how to acquire and remember the content, and ensure they monitor their own learning, will help the student become a more purposeful, effective learner. In other words, learning strategies should be taught in order to help the student learn how to learn. Different strategies will be more effective for different types of learning and different content areas. One common learning strategy that is often used in a variety of content areas is the use of mnemonics to help improve memory for facts. Mnemonics are especially useful for facts that have to be remembered in a particular order, such as the order of operations in math or the order of the planets in the solar system. The more entertaining the mnemonic, the more likely it is to be remembered.

Accommodations

A student with a learning disability may also require accommodations in addition to remedial education. The child who struggles with reading may need audio books, a test reader, or text reading software. This student may also benefit from access to reading assignments that are parallel in content to the assignment given to the general education class but are at a lower reading level. Students who struggle with written language may need copies of class notes, a scribe for writing, or speech-to-text software. This student may also need assistance with organizing written assignments. Learning to use a word processor and word anticipation software can be a valuable support for the student with writing difficulties. For the younger student struggling with writing tasks, raised line paper and pencil grips can be helpful. For the student with a learning disability in math, the use of manipulatives, a calculator, and math fact tables can help. These students can also be provided with math formulas and taught strategies to use for solving word problems and following algorithms.

Kristen’s Story: A Learning Disability in Reading

Colin's Story: How It Feels to Be Student Me

A learning disability is a life-long challenge, but students with learning disabilities will be encouraged to learn that learning disabilities are not that uncommon and many people with learning disabilities have successfully achieved their life goals. As we learn more about how the brain learns, teachers are able to develop better methods of remediation for the challenges that learning disabilities present. In addition, we are continuously developing better types of assistive technology to address these difficulties. The future for the student with a learning disability is a bright one.