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LEARNING DISABILITIES IN SCHOOL.
Term Paper ID:25998
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Causes, short- & long-term educational & social effects, attention deficit disorder, need for early diagnosis, legal issues. autism, role of school personnel.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
Causes, short- & long-term educational & social effects, attention deficit disorder, need for early diagnosis, legal issues. autism, role of school personnel.
Paper Introduction:
INTRODUCTION
Children may be bothered by a number of conditions that come under the heading of learning disabilities, and they may also be affected by problems that can appear to be learning disabilities. Learning disabilities make life difficult for children in the classroom. They also cause for the child as they grow all of the problems associated with the lack of an education, and they may also shape and distort the child's social abilities and his ability to acquire a variety of concepts we all possess that help us relate to ourselves, other people, and the world itself. Learning disabilities often show themselves in the classroom and emerge as the child is expected to learn and develop at the same pace as others in his or her age group, but instead, he or she shows the inability to learn, inattentiveness, difficult
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Third, by consulting with the most important people inchildren's lives, such as parents and teachers, the counselor can make anindirect impact on more children than would be possible with directcounseling services. Specialeducation services or general education services depend on theidentification of disorders in children, so educators need to be familiarwith the different assessment instruments and procedures used foridentifying children with ADD. McKinney, and A. (199 , November). Blalock (1987). Her story also points to the fact that learning disabilities neednot be permanent and need not be debilitating if they are diagnosed andtreated properly: "Reading, Writing, and Rage shows beyond a doubt thatTony Petri had many problems--perceptual problems, possible neurologicalproblems, visual problems, allergy problems, family problems. Ungerleider, D.F. Pfiffner (1993, November)."Diagnosis of attention deficit disorders in DSM-IV: Scientific basis andimplications for education." Exceptional Children. Bothmen had borrowed the term from adult psychiatry, where it had been used torefer to the progressive loss of contact with the outside world experiencedby schizophrenics. CONSEQUENCES Learning disabilities prevent children from participating fully inthe social, educational, and family life enjoyed by others, and the failureto correct these problems leads to even more difficulties in later life. Autism is adisease that often has effects just as bad as learning disabilities forwhat it does to the family as on the sufferer. Even a child showing some autistic features may not really beautistic, which is why careful and accurate diagnosis is important. Montague, McKinney, and Hocutt (1994) suggest thatwhat should be used is a multilevel, multimodal approach to assessment andidentification. The child may also show signs ofhyperactivity, poor memory, and distorted perception. They alsocause for the child as they grow all of the problems associated with thelack of an education, and they may also shape and distort the child'ssocial abilities and his ability to acquire a variety of concepts we allpossess that help us relate to ourselves, other people, and the worlditself. Stimulants improvethe behavior of hyperactive children, and there is evidence that this isaccomplished by lowering the quantity and intensity of motor activity,producing better attention, improved compliance to requests by adults, moreappropriate peer interactions, higher efficiency of problem solving, andincreased academic productivity. LEARNING DISABILITIES IN SCHOOL Most learning disabilities emerge in the school setting, but it isalso true that schools often miss the signs and fail to cope with theproblems raised by learning disabilities. and J.W. McBurnett, K., B.B. Reeve, R.E. Learning disabilities often show themselves in the classroom andemerge as the child is expected to learn and develop at the same pace asothers in his or her age group, but instead, he or she shows the inabilityto learn, inattentiveness, difficulty in judging concepts of time, poorlanguage development, and so forth. Autism was first identified in 1943, though certainly it existed longbefore it was described and named by Leo Kanner of the Johns HopkinsChildren's Psychiatric Clinic. The law providingfunding for special education is known as the Individuals with DisabilitiesEducation Act (IDEA). LEGAL ISSUES The diagnosis of ADD in a school setting takes place today in termsof legal requirements about the assessment of children with ADD undereither P.L. (1987, March). (1993, June). Some learning disabilities have been found to have a neurologicalbasis, meaning a physical condition in the brain, and these disabilitiesare called full-blown disorders. They say that what is needed is a multidisciplinary teamincluding both regular and special educators, administrators, and relatedservice personnel such as school psychologists, nurses, or speech andlanguage clinicians, as well as parents and students when this isconsidered appropriate. Reeve sayschildren affected by ADHD are hyperactive, distractable, emotionallylabile, and perseverative (Reeve, 199 , 7 ). Vellutino, F.R. 93-112, the Vocational Rehabilitation ActAmendments of 1973. Theyounger the child, the harder it is to make an accurate diagnosis. One of the DSM-III criteria for the diagnosis of ADD was that a minimum set of behavioraldescribed symptoms would be present. A failure to cope leads to severe consequences as the child grows toadulthood. 1 1-476, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act(IDEA), or Section 5 4 of P.L. The first diagnosis of ADD in DSM was called"Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood" in 1968. At the same time, Hans Asperger was making his own independentdiscovery of the syndrome. These changes were developedthrough a long and time-consuming process by expert consultations andscientific field trials to produce a category of diagnosis that is morereliable as a diagnosis (McBurnett, Lahey, and Pfiffner, 1993, 1 8). "Touching the lives of children:consultative interventions that work." Elementary School Guidance andCounseling, 19 -2 1. Its presence is shown by mirrorwriting and letter reversal. SCHOOL PERSONNEL Teachers are not the only school personnel who need to understand andbe able to isolate learning disabilities. Adults with learningdisabilities. Mathias (1992) notes that theelementary school counselor in particular is in a good position to serve asconsultant, and she gives several reasons for this which define the healthcounseling function itself as broadly as possible. Second, elementary school teachers aregenerally child-centered and operate from a "whole child" perspective, andthey are willing to seek and accept help in areas where the counselor hasknowledge. INTRODUCTION Children may be bothered by a number of conditions that come underthe heading of learning disabilities, and they may also be affected byproblems that can appear to be learning disabilities. The mostcommon side effects to these drugs are loss of appetite and difficultysleeping, but sometimes involuntary movements and depression have also beennoted (Reeve, 199 , 74-75). The special education program is designed to accomplish thisand is funded by both the state and federal governments. Montague, M., J.D. However, theextent of each of these, considered in isolation, does not justify theutter totality of his school failure" (Ungerleider, 1985, 2 5).Ungerleider finds that even as this child was diagnosed and as treatmentwas created for him, his own rage prevented any possible solution fromworking: "Tony Petri failed to learn because of rage--an abiding, sucked-inanger that began with a label of Wrongness and grew, cumulatively, witheach new affront to his self-worth" (Ungerleider, 1985, 2 5). (1993, Fall). Theearliest conceivable age for an autism diagnosis is two years old, and areliable diagnosis for classic autism usually is not possible until atleast age three. "Dyslexia." Scientific American, 35-41. Criteria for diagnosis have appearedand disappeared. A more recent description offered byVellutino (1987) is that dyslexia is a subtle language deficiency which hasits "roots in other areas: phonological-coding deficits (inability torepresent and access the sound of a word in order to help remember theword); deficient phonemic segmentation (inability to break words intocomponent sounds); poor vocabulary development; and trouble discriminatinggrammatical and syntactic differences among words and sentences"(Vellutino, 1987, 35). The conditionhas been recognized for over half a century, and descriptions of behaviorassociated with it have been in agreement over that time. Johnson and Blalock (1987) note that adults with untreatedlearning disabilities have "generalized meaning problems" in that they havedifficulty with the acquisition of meaning and concepts: "They generallyscore within the average range of ability on tasks requiring perception,perceptual-motor functions, and short term memory, but below average ontasks of conceptualization, reasoning, comprehension, and transfer ofknowledge" (Johnson and Blalock, 1987, n.p.). Mathias, C.E. At the same time, early intervention is associated with amore positive outcome for the autistic child, but such intervention isstill not possible without an accurate diagnosis (Lay, 1993, 23-24). This pointsto one of the first problems associated with learning disability, the factthat it harms the development of a child's sense of self and sense of valueso that it creates a lowered self-esteem such as would block learning inmost children without the added problem of the learning disability itself. DSM-III was the first revision torecognize specific criteria for diagnosing subtypes of ADD with and withouthyperactivity. Learningdisabilities make life difficult for children in the classroom. Ritalin is the most commonly prescribeddrug for ADHD children. DIFFERENT PROBLEMS Certain neurological problems may seem to be learning disabilitiesand yet may be classified differently, and one such is autism. Ungerleider (1985) points thisout with reference to her story of one student and how he was failed byschools. 1 8-117. Various criticisms led in DSM-III-R in 1987 to newdiagnostic criteria and to the determination that 8 of 14 symptoms werenecessary for a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder(McBurnett, Lahey, and Pfiffner, 1993, 1 9-11 ). Learning disabilitiesare then only one of the many areas with which the teacher and thecounselor must cope. Assessment and identification is intendedfor determining the presence of a suspected disorder, and at the secondlevel of assessment those who have been identified as needing specializededucational programs are assessed further to determine their educationalneeds in academic, behavioral, and social-emotional areas (Montague,McKinney, and Hocutt, 1994, 212-213). References Frith, U. It is therefore important to diagnose this problem early so thecourse of instruction for the child can be created to let the child do hisor her best. Autism is a developmentalhandicap that impairs the ability to process social and linguisticinformation, including the autistic person's emotions and those of others.Observers describe autism in various ways, but generally they see ahelpless child trapped inside a syndrome that prevents them from relatingnormally to the world and that distorts learning, destroys emotionalstability, and produces a sense of hopelessness in child and parent alike.Many childhood disabilities and emotional disorders resemble autism,especially in very young children, and these include symbiotic disorder,reactive attachment disorder, and nonverbal learning disabilities, amongothers. Mathias also finds that there are many consultativeinterventions the counselor can use, and the counselor know about manydifferent approaches: "In selecting an intervention, the counselor asconsultant needs to consider the particular context of the situation, theneeds involved, the group targeted, and the consultant's own values andknowledge of interventions" (Mathias, 1992, 191). Lay, C. "Autism." Scientific American, 1 8-114. N.P.: Grune & Stratton. Reeve (199 ) notes that while ADHD is a serious problem, informationregarding it has not been easy to find for school personnel. Encino,California: RWR Press. Medication is the most widelyused treatment, but it is also the most controversial. First, elementaryschool counseling is said to be proactive and developmental, enabling thecounselor to work from a broad systems perspective which children and staffmembers can use to their advantage. "If you think your child has autism." WholeEarth Review, 24-25. Attention deficit disorders (ADDs) have been classified as partof the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM), whichspecifically contains changes in the way attention deficit hyperactivitydisorder (ADHD) is diagnosed and identified. Dexedrine and Cylert have also been frequentlyused, and antidepressants such as Imipramine are also used. Dyslexia is actually a generic termthat refers to an extraordinary difficulty experienced by otherwise normalchildren in learning to identify printed words, and the problem is thoughtto originate in the visual-spatial system. Johnson, D.J. Kanner observed 11 children who seemed tohim to form a recognizable group, as all had in common four traits: apreference for aloneness, an insistence on sameness, a liking for elaborateroutines, and some abilities that seemed remarkable compared with thedeficits. Lahey, and L.J. Fourteen symptoms were arranged intothree groups to match the main features of the disorder--inattention,impulsivity, and hyperactivity. Most Asperger's Syndrome children are not diagnosed untilthey reach grade school because of their relatively high level offunctioning. Often they are sensitive and adept in processingnonverbal communication, but they have difficulty with idiomatic orfigurative language used in social situations" (Johnson and Blalock, 1987,n.p.). Some learning disabilities relate more to specific areas of study,and dyslexia is such a disorder, showing the apparent inability to learn toprocess written information properly. They may show generalizedlanguage comprehension difficulties, in which case they may have goodnonverbal skills but not be able to use oral language comprehension whichthen interferes with verbal expression, reading comprehension, writtenexpression, and mathematical reasoning: "They have higher performanceintelligence than verbal. "ADHD: Facts and fallacies."Intervention in School and Clinic, 7 -77. Reading, writing, and rage. All the team members should be involved in makingdecisions about the assessment and identification of students. Theterminology and classification of ADD has been confusing because each yeara new version of the DSM has included a major revision of the ways toidentify ADD, and children with the same clinical symptoms have been givenone of half a dozen different labels. Autistic children seemed to suffer this same lack ofcontact with the world around them from a very early age (Frith, 1993,1 8). (1985). Hocutt (1994, March).Intervention in School and Clinic, 212-217. (1992, February). What is interesting about the disorder is that"far from being a visual problem, dyslexia appears to be the consequence oflimited facility in using language to code other types of information"(Vellutino, 1987, 35). He was at the University Pediatric Clinic inVienna preparing his doctoral thesis on the same type of child, and he alsoused the term "autism" to refer to the core features of the disorder. New criteria were added in198 , and the new system had clear advantages over the old. It is expensive, but it is also necessary for thewell-being of the child and for the well-being of the adult once the childgrows up and goes to work. Attention problems often come under thisheading.
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