ALDA

 

Adult Learning Disabilities:

the Challenges and the Opportunities

 

 

Difficulties or disabilities?

 

  • Rereading lines several times
  • Loses place when reading
  • Has trouble reading individual words
  • Difficulty distinguishing similar sounds (big/pig)
  • Confuses the sequencing of spoken sounds (ephelant)
  • Insufficient factual knowledge
  • Incorrect factual knowledge
  • Trouble remembering facts
  • Cannot reliably identify main themes and key concepts
  • Cannot apply new knowledge to solve problems
  • Cannot effectively separate essential from nonessential information
  • Cannot learn without many concrete examples
  •  Messy handwriting
  • Cannot put thoughts down on paper
  • Bad spelling
  • Trouble following directions
  • Doesn’t know how to approach a task; where to begin
  • Trouble filtering out extraneous noise
  • Unable to work independently
  • Unable to work in a team
  • Fails to benefit from training

Factors pointing to learning difficulties but not learning disabilities:

  • Inadequate educational opportunities
  • Poor instruction
  • Poor instructor-student fit
  • Poor curriculum/instructional design
  • Low motivation
  • Poor vision or hearing
  • Poor family, social, or cultural environment
  • ESL
  • Brain injury

Some Learning Disability Facts and Observations:

 

  • Learning disabilities are lifelong conditions
  • Degree of deficit in adulthood depends on the severity of the disability in childhood
  • Individuals with learning disabilities frequently exhibit secondary emotional and behavioral difficulties, including depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem
  • Social skill deficits contribute at least as much as academic deficits to job failure

LD Employment Challenges:

 

  • Recalling names and messages
  • Remembering sequences of instructions
  • Losing things
  • Inaccurate reading

Communication:

 

  • Talking too much/too little
  • Conveying messages
  • Inefficient reading, writing, and spelling  

Personal Management:

 

  • Organization
  • Completing tasks
  • Time management  

What are learning disabilities?

 

  • “Learning Disabilities” are manifested by significant difficulties in the acquisition and use of listening, speaking, reading, writing, reason or mathematical abilities.”
  • These disorders are intrinsic to the individual, presumed to be due to central nervous system dysfunction, and may occur across the life span.
  • Problems in self-regulatory behaviors, social perception and social interaction may exist with learning disabilities but do not by themselves constitute a learning disability.
  • Although learning disabilities may occur concomitantly with other handicapping conditions (e.g., sensory impairment, mental challenges, serious emotional disturbance) or with extrinsic influences (e.g. cultural differences, insufficient or inappropriate instruction), they are not the result of those conditions or influences.”

Common Elements of LD Definitions:

  • Failure to achieve
  • Cognitive processing deficit
  • Etiology
  • Exclusionary criteria
  • Significant discrepancy

What causes learning disabilities?

The underlying causes of learning disabilities all have to do with how the brain processes information, specifically:

  • How it processes sounds
  • How it converts text to sounds and sounds to test
  • How it accesses information from memory
  • How quickly it processes information
  • How it handles visual and spatial information
  • How it coordinates the sequencing of all its mental activities

How are learning disabilities assessed?

 

A valid learning disability assessment should include at least the following:

  • Medical history (e.g. head injuries; exposure to environmental toxins)
  • Developmental history (e.g. onset of developmental milestones such as walking and talking)
  • Educational history (e.g. school grades; type of remedial instruction provided)
  • Intellectual ability
  • Performance on measures of academic achievement  

  A valid assessment needs to take into account the fact that many adults have been out of school for years, and in many cases never received adequate schooling in the first place. This is one reason why assessing adult learning disabilities is much more challenging that assessing school-aged learning problems.

The most frequently used tests for assessing intellectual ability:

 

  • The Stanford-Binet
  • The Woodcock-Johnson Cognitive Battery
  • The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales (WAIS 111)

The WAIS Full Scale IQ score consist of the following fundamental intellectual ability factors:

  • The Verbal score is a measure of acquired knowledge, verbal reasoning and comprehension of verbal information.
  • The Performance score provides an indication of an individual’s nonverbal reasoning spatial processing skills, attentiveness to detail and visual-motor integration.
  • The Working Memory Index provides information regarding an individual’s ability to attend to verbally presented information, to process information in memory, and then to formulate a response.
  • The processing Speed Index provides a measure of an individual’s ability to process simple or routine visual information quickly and efficiently and to quickly perform tasks based on that information.

The most valid tests for assessing academic achievement:

 

  • The Woodcock-Johnson Diagnostic Reading Battery-Revised, Tests of Achievement, including:

Woodcock –Johnson Diagnostic Reading Battery

The Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT 11)

  • Interpreting Commonly Reported Test Scores
  • Standard Scores (SS)

These scores are based on a normative reference group. They have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 points.

  • Percentile Ranks (PR)

These scores indicate a relative ranking with respect to the reference group. (For example, a 60th percentile indicates a performance level at or above that of 60 per cent of the population taking the test).

  • The Standard Discrepancy Criterion LD if:

 

[(Full scale IQ) – (Standard Scale Achievement Score)] > 1.5SDd

AND

            Full scale IQ = 85 – 115

                                                            AND

            Other exclusionary criteria apply

  • Regression-based Discrepancy

Issues to consider when applying the discrepancy formula:

  • The lower the IQ, the more learning difficulties can be expected, but the less likely the discrepancy criterion can be met.
  • The higher the IQ, the easier it is to satisfy the discrepancy criterion.
  • Achievement tests and IQ tests are correlated (e.g. not independent measures of abilities). Both measure many similar cognitive processes underlying linquistic and numerical abilities.

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