SEARCH · PubMed Health

Results for “Learning Disabilities”

Explore indexed PubMed citations for clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health research. Read source abstracts and follow each citation to its original PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

PubMed1983

A categorical analysis of the social attributions of learning-disabled children.

The social attributions of learning-disabled and control children with either similar or higher social acceptance ratings were assessed within an open-ended interview format. In addition, measures of social self-esteem and expectation of social success were obtained. The learning-disabled group used luck more frequently and personality interaction less frequently as explanations for social outcomes than did the other two groups. Learning-disabled children also had the lowest expectation of social success and, like the low acceptance group, had a poorer social self-image. Possible explanations for the development of these attributions and the implications for holding them were discussed.

Child↗

PubMed1983

Learning disabilities and the college student: identification and diagnosis.

The identification and diagnosis of a learning disability in the college student are complex tasks. They constitute important tasks when we realize that 720,000 college students (6 percent, if we assume that there are 12 million in college today) may be learning disabled ( Astin 1983). It is evident that children with learning disabilities are at risk for psychological and social problems in adolescence and young adulthood ( Bellak 1979; Crabtree 1981; Cruikshank et al. 1980; Horowitz 1981). There is a risk that the learning disability will not be identified, and, hence, the problem will be treated as only a psychogenic one. Unfortunately, this will tend to contribute not only to the student's feelings of guilt, stupidity, and inability to change but also to the clinician's sense of frustration. The description of the learning disabled college student and the two-step identification process in this chapter provides guidelines to aid understanding of these issues. Most colleges have not yet come to grips with what it means to have learning disabled students in terms of teaching, academic evaluation, diagnosis, and college counseling. To do so is important not only because of recent laws that guarantee equal educational opportunity for these students but also because a learning disability, whether overt or covert, can profoundly affect a person's educational and psychosocial development. It has often been said that the capacity to love and work is the foundation for the healthy adult. It is easy to see how academic learning is the work of the college student and educational success or failure is linked integrally to self-esteem and self-love.

Dyslexia↗

PubMed1989

Social skills deficits as a primary learning disability.

Advances in the definition of social skills deficits in children and youth with learning disabilities are presented and critiqued. The proposed modified definition of learning disability by the Interagency Committee on Learning Disabilities, which includes social skills deficits as a specific learning disability, is presented and discussed. This definition is analyzed from primary, secondary, and social learning theory causative hypotheses. Development of an adequate assessment technology is viewed as critical to the identification and classification of social skills deficits in children and youth with learning disabilities.

Government Agencies↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Instructional and curricular requisites of mainstreamed students with learning disabilities.

The successful integration of students with learning disabilities into mainstream reading classes may require teachers to adapt instruction and curricula in major ways. In this article, we discuss the relation between the instruction prescribed by standardized commercial curricula and the reading achievement of mainstreamed students with learning disabilities and other low-performing nonhandicapped students. An instructional template designed to complement commercially published reading lessons is described and its effects on the reading achievement of mainstreamed students with learning disabilities examined. Next, the limitations of generic instructional procedures to rectify the deficiencies of mainstream curricular programs for students with greater-than-average instructional needs are reviewed. We conclude with a discussion of the complexity of educating instructively needy learners in mainstream settings and the significance of well-designed instruction.

Achievement↗

PubMed1978

Pharmacists' knowledge and attitudes regarding monitoring the behaviors of children with learning disabilities.

The attitudes and knowledge of pharmacists in Nebraska regarding children's learning disabilities were surveyed by questionnaire. One hundred thirty-three pharmacists responded. The results were analyzed according to type of practice (community, chain and hospital) and age (20--30 years, 31--40 years, 41--50 years, and 51 years and over). The results indicate that pharmacists are being asked about learning disabilities. Overall, 53% of the pharmacists responding had been asked about learning disabilities by parents, physicians, teachers or others. No significant interactions were found between the type of practice and age, and no significant main effect for type of practice was found in the ANOVA results for knowledge scores or attitude scores. Even though there were no differences owing to age in pharmacists' knowledge of learning disabilities, age was found to have a significant effect on attitudes toward increased pharmacist involvement in monitoring behaviors of learning-disabled children; the younger groups had a more positive attitude. The pharmacist seems to have the knowledge and attitudes required to become more actively involved in monitoring the medications and behaviors of children with learning disabilities.

Adult↗

PubMed1980

Relating infant temperament to learning disabilities.

The role of infant temperament in the development of learning disabilities was at issue. As infants, boys with severe learning disabilities were found to be (1) lower in activity level, (2) more irregular, (3) less approaching, and (4) more negative in mood than "normal" boys. Discussion centered around conceptualizing learning disabilities as the outcome of a developmental process. Thus patterns of early parent-infant interaction are established, based in part upon the infant's temperament, that may evolve into a learning disability.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Mainstream Experiences for Learning Disabled students (Project MELD): preliminary report.

Mainstream Experiences for the Learning Disabled (MELD) was developed to accommodate students with learning disabilities in the mainstream. This article reports the progress of 13 students at the end of 1 year of planning and 1 year of implementing the MELD model in one urban elementary school. Observational and school adjustment data from the implementation year suggest that although the MELD model was not fully incorporated into the mainstream classes, students with learning disabilities adjusted well to a less individualized and more demanding mainstream program. They came to school regularly, did not present serious behavior problems, and spent as much of reading class and more of math class on task as they had in special education. These students in the mainstream were assigned more opportunities to work with text materials rather than workbooks in reading and spent significantly more reading time in teacher-directed lessions. Nevertheless, the students made no significant progress in reading or math and earned lower grades during the implementation year. The authors suggest that students with learning disabilities will not succeed in the mainstream if teachers continue "business as usual" in mainstream classes.

Achievement↗

PubMed1982

Learning disabled children's syntactic proficiency on a communicative task.

Previous studies have generally examined learning disabled children's syntactic ability either on structured tasks or by analyzing oral language samples collected under conditions not typical of natural communicative settings. Thus, these studies are of limited value in exploring the impact of learning disabled children's deficits in linguistic structure on their use of language in social contexts. The purpose of this study was to investigate learning disabled children's syntactic proficiency during a task requiring them to convey information to a listener. Subjects were selected on the bases of teacher ratings, reading achievement scores, and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test IQ scores within the normal range; those children identified as learning disabled received low ratings and demonstrated underachievement (below 40th percentile for their grade) in reading. Oral language samples were collected by having learning disabled and normally achieving children in grades two, four, six, and eight participate in a referential communication task in which they described abstract shapes to an experimenter. The length and syntactic complexity of the children's descriptions were assessed. Learning disabled children in all grades were found to produce shorter mean t-units and shorter mean main clauses than nondisabled children even on this relatively simple communicative task. Although learning disabled children's linguistic problems have previously been characterized as subtle, these findings suggest that their productive language deficits may be significant enough to interfere with even the informal and elliptical conversations characteristic of communication among peers and family members.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1985

Ocular anomalies: a comparison of learning disabled and nonlearning disabled elementary school children.

This study compared descriptive data, obtained via retinal reflex photography, concerning ocular anomalies of 439 learning disabled elementary school children, 1657 kindergarten and Grade 1 nonlearning disabled children, and 724 nonlearning disabled children in Grades 2 to 6. Ocular factors included refractive and nonametropic errors as well as severity of the problem. The learning disabled sample had a significantly higher incidence of refractive error than the normal samples in Kindergarten and Grade 1 but lower incidence than the normal sample in Grades 2 to 6. The learning disabled group had a significantly higher incidence of myopia in one or both eyes than did the kindergarten and first grade normal group. No such difference for myopia existed between the learning disabled and the normal sample in Grades 2 to 6. Incidence of hyperopia in both eyes was significantly lower in the learning disabled than in the kindergarten-first grade sample; however, hyperopia in one eye only was greater for the learning disabled than for the older normals. Significant differences between the younger and older normals existed for all types of refractive error except hyperopia in only one eye. Severity of the problem differed significantly between the learning disabled and the kindergarten-first grade sample in the classes of severe and minimal, not at all when comparing learning disabled and older normals, and in all classes when comparing younger and older normals. The learning disabled also had a significantly higher incidence of nonametropic anomalies than did the normal group. Implications relating refractive error and near environment were discussed.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Toward a scientific pedagogy of learning disabilities: a sameness in the message.

The development of a scientific pedagogy of learning disabilities as called for by Kirk and Bateman (1962) requires the rendering of a science of learning disabilities and a pedagogy derived from that science. But such a pedagogy is necessarily incomplete if it fails to recognize that the structure of the curriculum significantly shapes the act of teaching students identified as learning disabled. The current thinking about curricula is that the universe of information that a curriculum program comprises need only be organized around subject area topics (e.g., mathematics, reading, language arts, science, social studies) and hierarchically arranged in a scope and sequence that has as its main characteristic the general ordering of skills from simple to complex. For all practical purposes, information is viewed as raw material (Kaufman et al., 1990) that can be nominally organized and readily packaged. The information is then consumed as curriculum that requires little or no transformation of its form or structure. The articles in this series of the Journal of Learning Disabilities provide examples of how transforming information by identifying and developing curricula around structural samenesses can lead to a pedagogy that is efficient and effective. The development of a scientific pedagogy of learning disabilities requires that the field acknowledge the importance of curriculum structure and the complexity of information. The field must also examine the intricacies of designing curricula with the same kind of commitment and passion it has demonstrated in the last 30 years in investigating the etiology and organic basis of learning disabilities.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Achievement↗

PubMed1983

Lateral dominance in children with learning disabilities.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the occurrence of lateral dominance problems in a sample of children with learning disabilities. Ninety-one children (62 boys, 29 girls) who attended a school for children with learning disabilities were selected for the study. The Harris tests of lateral dominance were administered individually, and the children were rated as having right, left, or mixed dominance for hand, eye, and foot. When compared with normative data on dominance in children, the results showed that the occurrence of mixed hand dominance was no more frequent, the occurrence of mixed eye dominance was less frequent, and the occurrence of mixed foot dominance was more frequent in the children with learning disabilities. Results also showed that the occurrence of mixed and crossed eye-hand dominance was significantly different in children with learning disabilities when compared with children without learning disabilities. However, the occurrence of mixed eye-hand dominance was found to be significantly greater in children without learning disabilities than in learning disabled children. Age and sex were not found to affect the occurrence of lateral dominance problems in children with learning disabilities.

Child↗

PubMed1984

Learning disability: 10-year follow-up.

A 10-year follow-up of 114 learning-disabled students has been conducted, gathering information on their academic achievement, social success, and job satisfaction. These students have been compared with 144 siblings without learning disabilities. Significantly lower levels of school attainment, academic success, and social success are found for the learning-disabled group. No difference is found in level of job satisfaction. Significant positive factors contributing to school success in the learning-disabled group were high IQ, less severe learning disability, positive personality characteristics in the child, effective family function, strong family support, high occupational level of family breadwinner, and high education level attained by the mother. Negative factors are a more severe degree of learning disability, the presence of hyperactivity, and a concomitant disability in mathematics.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1990

A descriptive study of adults with suspected learning disabilities.

This article documents a descriptive study of 80 adults considered to have learning disabilities. The study was initiated by the Language and Learning Disabled Adults Task Force in London, Ontario, for the purpose of developing a profile of the self-perceived characteristics and needs of the adult population with learning disabilities in Southwestern Ontario. The study also served as a vehicle for implementation of the Intake Questionnaire, an instrument with potential as a screening device for service agencies working with adults with learning disabilities. A self-referred and agency-referred sample of 80 adults completed the Intake Questionnaire. Data were collected in the areas of demography, education, employment, health, and psychosocial characteristics, aspirations, and cooperation with further testing. Results describe people with ongoing specific problems in education, employment, and psychosocial functioning who aspire to learn more about themselves and their learning disabilities.

Achievement↗

PubMed1991

Methodological issues and learning disabilities diagnosis in clinical populations.

Previous research suggests that the diagnosis of a comorbid learning disability is dependent on the method used for making the LD diagnosis. This study investigated that proposition by studying the effects of using three approaches to the assessment of learning disabilities in a sample of 177 six- to thirteen-year-old boys referred to outpatient mental health clinics for behavior problems. The use of these three procedures to diagnose comorbid learning problems produced significantly different results. All methods identified significant numbers of children in the clinical population as learning disabled; however, each method identified children with differing characteristics. Consistent with predictions from measurement theory, the commonly used simple standard score discrepancy method was more likely to identify children with above-average IQs as learning disabled, whereas a regression approach identified learning disabilities more consistently across the ability range. These results were interpreted as supporting the use of regression approaches to diagnose co-occurring learning disabilities, as that method is less likely to be biased by the child's intelligence test score. The implications of the use of each method in research investigations is also discussed.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1975

Immediate recall fo semantically varied "sentences" by learning-disabled adolescents.

The immediate recall of 20 semantically and syntactically varied sentences was assessed and compared for 30 learning-disabled and 30 academically achieving adolescents. Learning-disabled adolescents repeated significantly fewer of the sentences verbatim than their achieving age peers. They exhibited significant reductions in the recall of sentences which violated semantic (selectional) rules, contained correctly and incorrectly sequenced modifier-strings, contained a random word-setting, or were syntactically complex. Perseveration errors occured more frequently among the learning-disabled adolescents than among the achievers and inter-sentence perseverative errors were exhibited only by those who were learning disabled. The rank order of difficulty for the sentences agreed for the two groups, suggesting primarily quantitative reductions in the immediate recall by the learning-disabled adolescents. The findings suggest that learning-disabled adolescents depend heavily upon semantic aspects for language processing, experience immediate memory and sequencing problems for modifier-strings, and exhibit a prevalence of interfering perseverative responses.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1991

Tactile discrimination, response mode, and interhemispheric communication by learning disabled children.

32 right-handed, learning disabled children aged 8-10 yr., 11-13 yr., and 14-16 yr. were presented a tactile discrimination task. Pairs of fabrics of different or the same texture were presented to the same hand (uncrossed condition) or alternating hands (crossed condition). Discrimination errors were compared using a verbal response mode and a nonverbal response mode. Analysis indicated that the number of crossed errors was significantly greater in the verbal response mode than in the nonverbal response mode for only the youngest children. These results suggest selective attention-activation bias and/or hemispheric processing limitations for younger learning disabled children.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1990

WAIS-R scores as predictors of employment success and failure among adults with learning disabilities.

The transition of adults with learning disabilities to successful employment is contingent upon numerous factors. Eighty-six adults (55 males and 31 females), 18 to 59 years old (mean age 26.7 years), with learning disabilities were evaluated clinically using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) (Wechsler, 1981) to determine the value of WAIS-R IQs and subtest scores in predicting successful employment. Significant relationships were identified between subjects' WAIS-R IQs and scaled scores and job success. Conclusions and recommendations were reported.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1977

Hair element content in learning disabled children.

Hair samples from 31 learning disabled and 22 normal children were analyzed for content of 14 elements. Significant group differences were determined and a discriminant function was completed which separated the groups with 98 per cent accuracy. Elevated lead and cadmium content in the learning disabled group is viewed as being of particular importance.

Cadmium↗