Identification And

Management of Children
with Specific Learning
Disability
LEARNING DISABILITY
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 an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell or do
mathematical calculations, including conditions such as perceptual disabilities,
brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia and developmental aphasia.
However, learning disabilities do not include learning problems that are
primarily the result of visual, hearing, or motor disabilities, of mental
retardation, of emotional disturbance, or of environmental, cultural, or
economic disadvantage. (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 2002)
SIGNIFICANT ASPECT OF DEFINITION

• Show discrepancy between achievement and intelligence.

• Handicaps such as MR, visual and hearing impairment and emotional/

behavioral disorders must be ruled out.
Types of learning disability
• Disorders of reading – Dyslexia
• Disorders of written language- Dysgraphia
• Disorders of Mathematics- Dyscalculia
• Non-verbal learning disability
Characteristics of SLD
• Disorders of Attention:- Children having short attention span and lack
of concentration. LD is frequently associated with hyperactivity too.
• Disorders of Memory:- Difficulty recalling visual material, difficulty on
task requiring auditory discrimination.
• Academic characteristics:- Dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia.
• Disorders of listening:- Struggle to follow directions and explain the
sequence of events in stories.
• Disorders of speech:- child use lots of “fillers” such as “uh…uh”, I
mean etc.
• Perceptual impairment:- it includes visual perceptual deficits and
auditory perceptual deficits.
Visual perceptual deficit:-
• Figure ground discrimination:- Unable to discriminate between visual
details or when reading LD children will skip lines and have difficulty
‘tracking’.
• Spatial relationship:- difficulty in concepts related to directionality
(like left/right, under/above) which impact their academic skills.
• Visual discrimination:- difficulty to make fine discriminations between
objects, letters, & numbers (like b and d; p and q).
• Visual- motor integration:- perceptual and motor learning go side by
side. For example, when a child traces a line, he alters the movement
and direction of his hand in response to feedback from visual
information. LD children have difficulty in buttoning, lacing, cutting,
pasting, writing and copying from the blackboard.
Auditory perceptual deficits
• Auditory discrimination:- difficulty to identify similarities and
differences between two or more sounds (cat, mat, rat).
• Auditory blending:- it is the ability to bend or combine sounds to form
words. Dyslexic readers tend to read in a disjointed manner and have
difficulty breaking apart and putting together blends (bl, sp, gr) and
digraphs (ch, gh, th).
Motor coordination deficits
• Gross motor skills
• Fine motor skills
Difference between SLD, slow learning and intellectual
disability

• Learning disabled children:- A child with a specific learning disability,

in contrast, will have average or above average intelligence (85 ) and
will have specific difficulties which can make learning very challenging
but performing at or above the average in other areas. The child's
potential or overall intelligence is greater than his/her poor
achievement would predict. This is called the ability-achievement
discrepancy. 
• Slow learner:- A child who is considered a slow learner will have
below average intelligence (70- 85) and their thinking skills will be
considered below normal for her age. In order to grasp new concepts,
a slow learner needs more time, more repetition, and often more
resources from teachers to be successful. 
• Intellectual disability/ Mental retardation:- Mental retardation is a
condition of arrested or incomplete development of the mind
characterized by impairment of skills and overall intelligence in areas
such as cognition, language, and motor and social abilities. They have
significantly sub-average general intellectual functioning, existing
concurrently with deficits in adaptive behavior and manifested during
the developmental period, that adversely affects a child's educational
performance.
 Causes of learning disabilities
• Neurological damage:- Can occur during the prenatal, natal and
postnatal periods such as prolonged labour, premature birth, birth
complications, maternal age, use of drugs and alcohol, maternal fetal
blood incompatibility, Rh- factor etc.
• Maturational delay:- like slow maturation of language skills- specially
reading, delayed development of motor skills, visual- motor problems,
right- left confusion, immaturity etc.
• Genetic factors:- evidence shows the presence of family history of LD.
• Nutritional deficiencies:- lead to delay development.
• Role of environment:- in economically deprived homes, children may
not be exposed to adequate sensory, linguistic and cognitive activities.
Dyslexia
• Dyslexia is more often seen in a boy than a girl.
• Severely disabled readers often have comprehension difficulties and
cannot understand the meaning of a given passage.
• Speech difficulties are also a typical characteristic of the dyslexic
reader (stuttering, lisping, cluttering).
• Omissions:- reader omit letters (eg. Belt/bet) or whole word when
reading.
• Addition or insertions:- reader inserts a letter where not required
(play/played) or a syllable (care/careful). This happens because child
fails to follow the context.

Cont…
• Substitutions:- the reader substitutes the words, which look the same
(house for home, guess for guest).
• Repetitions and regressions:- child frequently repeats words that he
cannot make sense of the meaning.
• Reversals:- LD persons twist symbols when reading and writing.
Letters, parts of words or whole word may be reversed (eg. P and q,
was for saw, aminal for animal etc.).
• Word by word reading:- reader frequently losses his place when
reading, using no intonation, expression or punctuation, and pausing
so long that he loses sight of the meaning.
Dyscalculia
• It is a condition that affects to acquire arithmetical skills.
• Dyscalculia learners may have difficulty understanding simple number
concept, lack an intuitive grasp of numbers, and have problems
learning number facts and procedures. Even if they produce a correct
answer, or use a correct method, they may do so mechanically and
without confidence.
• Difficulties with language of mathematics.
• Inadequate word problem solving skills.
• Poor maths reasoning.
Dysgraphia

• Disorders of written language are referred to as dysgraphia.

• Difficulties in three areas such as handwriting, spelling and content.
• Hand writing errors include too much slant, writing too straight,
writing too light, writing too heavy, spacing too wide etc.
• Spelling errors include letter reversals (b for d), reversals for whole
word (tuc for cut), confused sounds /c/ with /s/ (sat as cot), phonetic
spellings of nonphonetic words (some as sum) etc.
• Content or written expression difficulty includes the production of
immature and poorly organized compositions, produce an ‘oral ’ style
of writing. Their writing pieces contain slang words such as ‘hey, ok’
etc.
Management
• Reading problems:- Multisensory approaches are generally using such
as Fernald method, Orton- Gillingham method etc.
• Writing difficulty:-
1. Limit the number of new words introduced in a day
2. Include peer assisted and student directed instruction
3. Provide immediate error correction
4. Provide periodic review and retesting etc.
• Arithmetic disorder:-
1. Begin with concrete experiences
2. Relate math to real life problems etc.
THANK YOU