Specific Learning Disorder

Clinical Description

 Significant discrepancy between a person’s academic achievement and what would be expected for
someone of the same age—referred to by some as “unexpected underachievement”

 Person perform academically at a level significantly below that of a typical person of the same age,
cognitive ability (as measured on an IQ test), and educational background.

 Not be caused by a sensory difficulty, such as trouble with sight or hearing, and should not be the result
of poor or absent instruction.

 Clinicians can use the specifiers for disorders of reading, written expression, or mathematics to
highlight specific problems for remediation. As with other disorders, clinicians rate the disorder on
levels of severity.

 Response to intervention - involves identifying a child as having a specific learning disorder when the
response to a known effective intervention (for example, an early reading program) is significantly
inferior to the performance by peers

Statistics
 5% and 15% across youth of various ages and cultures.

 Frequency of this diagnosis appears to increase in wealthier regions of the country, suggesting that with
better access to diagnostic services, more children are identified

 Difficulties with reading are the most common of the learning disorders and occur in some form in 7%
of the general population

 Students with learning disorders are more likely to drop out of school, more likely to be unemployed,
more likely to have suicidal thoughts and attempt suicide.

Causes
 Theories about the causes of specific learning dis- order include genetic, neurobiological, and
environmental factors
- Learning disorders run in families,
- subtle brain impairment have also been thought responsible for learning disabilities
- structural, as well as functional, differences in the brains of people with learning disabilities
- Three areas of the le hemisphere appear to be involved in problems with dyslexia (word
recognition)—Broca’s area (which affects articulation and word analysis), an area in the le
parietotemporal area (affects word analysis), and an area in the left occipitotemporal area (which
affects recognizing word form)

- Intraparietal sulcus—seems to be critical for the development of a sense of numbers and is

implicated in mathematics disorder
 Treatment of Specific Learning Disorder

 Educational e orts can be broadly categorized into (1) specific skills instruction, including instruction
on vocabulary, finding the main idea, and finding facts in readings, and (2) strategy instruction, which
includes e orts to improve cognitive skills through decision making and critical thinking

 Direct instruction - several components; among them are systematic instruction (using highly scripted
lesson plans that place students together in small groups based on their progress) and teaching for
mastery (teaching students until they understand all concepts)