Learning Disabilities Test 1

Wait-To-Fail Model

You have to wait and see if the person’s achievement will be less than their potential, but at that point the person has already failed

• They are missed or diagnosed

• They compensate in other ways so their disability isn’t disabling

• People don’t want to say that LD is the sole reason for problems or difficulties

Reasons That People With LD Aren’t Diagnosed

The Behavioralists

• Didn’t like the processing approach because it says you should address a problem you can’t observe with a mechanism you can’t see

• In contrast, the behavioralists were very concrete and into observation

Specific learning disorder

specific neurological disorders that affect the brain’s ability to store, process, or communicate information

Phineas Gage

• A railroad worker who survived a severe brain injury in 1848, leading to changes in his personality and behavior, contributing to our understanding of neuroplasticity and the brain's role in behavior

• Learned from his case that the frontal lobe is connected to behaviors and memory

Aphasia

• Loss of ability to understand or express speech, caused by brain damage

• Studied by Frans Josef Gall

Franz Joseph Gall

• Studied Aphasia

• Was able to discover that the brain has different portions for different functions

• Later fell out of favor because he became heavily involved with phrenology (skull reading)

• Worked with patients who couldn’t understand or communicate through speech even though they were otherwise cognitively typical

Paul Broca

• French physician who discovered Broca's area in the brain, an area in the left temporal lobe responsible for speech production

Broca’s Aphasia

• Non-verbal aphasia

• Someone with this condition has something to say but just can’t get it out

• Non-fluent speech, few words, short sentences out of sequence, many pauses, mono-pitch, comprehension is intact

• First time specific deficit was linked with specific area of the brain

Carl Wernicke

Neurologist who located a speech are in a different part of the left temporal lobe that, when damaged, can impact auditory and written word comprehension

Wernicke’s Aphasia

• Impaired language comprehension

• Loss of comprehension of spoken language

• Despite this impaired comprehension, speech may have a normal rate, rhythm, and grammar

• Distortion of articulate speech

• Word memory intact

• Speech remains fluent

Sir William Broadbent

Neurologist who was one of the first scientists to describe individuals who couldn’t read but who had no apparent cognitive or motor defects

Adolph Kussmaul

Physician who coined the term “Wortblindheit” (wordblindness)

William Pringle Morgan

• General practitioner who wrote the first academic paper on congenital word blindness about a kid who couldn’t learn to read in school

• He didn’t think that word blindness was from an accident or damage because the kid was born with it

James Hinshelwood

• First physician to write and advocate for a specific educational approach to word blindness

• Wrote about an inability to accurately interpret what the eyes are seeing

  • Meaning, the eyes are working fine, it’s just the brain is unable to process it correctly

Word Blindness

• An old-fashioned term used to mean that a person is unable to recognize and understand words that he sees

• Dyslexia before dyslexia

Rudolph Berlin

• Ophthalmologist who coined the term “dyslexia”

• Said that there’s a similarity between people who have word blindness and people who have brain injuries or birth defects

• But he also said that word blindness could run in families, which means that it must not be an injury, because injuries can’t be inherited

Samuel Orton

• Neurologist who believed that neither side of the brain was completely in control

• Believed that dominance of one brain hemisphere over another was the cause of learning disabilities

  • He “proved” this by saying that kids with dyslexia have trouble learning their left from their right

• Emphasized phonics

• Coined the term strephosymbolia

  • Some, but not all, people with dyslexia have this

• Shifted the field of LD from looking at the causes of LD, to focusing on identifying people with LD and trying to help them with their challenges

Strephosymbolia

When letters are seen backwards

Mixed Laterality

Most people are able to distinguish pretty clearly between the left and right sides of their bodies, but this happens when a person doesn't favor the same side of the body for a dominant hand, foot, eye and ear

Samuel Kirk

• Psychologist who coined the term “learning disabilities”

• Was at a conference with parents of children with certain mental issues in 1963, suggested that they should use the term learning disabilities, and focus on what’s the problem and how should it be addressed rather than the causes 

• Was hired by the government to reshape the definition of learning disabilities (over Bateman)

Brushing

A way to organize the sensory system of those with ADHD

Process Approach

• In order to identify a learning disability, you have to understand the process behind the disability

• Looking at LD as neurological deficiency and not an academic deficiency

J McVicker Hunt

• Published a book called “Intelligence and Experience” in 1961, and he looked at the impact of experience on brain development

• His work was based on the work of Robert Tryon

Robert Tryon

• Took mice and separated them by the best and worst results of their maze runs, and then bred them

• Bred “maze bright” and “maze dumb” mice

• First generation: normal distribution

• Eighth generation: bimodal curve

• Tenth generation: no overlap

• Conclusion: maze learning ability (intelligence?) is hereditary

Hebb and Hymovitch

• Raised mice in 4 environment variations

  • Free environment (perceptual and motor)

  • Small mesh cage (perceptual)

  • Running wheels (motor)

  • Stovepipe cages (neither perceptual nor motor)

  • Concluded that 1 and 2 were basically the same, as well as 3 and 4 - however, 1 and 2 were much better than 3 and 4

• Conclusion: perceptual enrichment has an effect on maze learning (intelligence?), while the motor enrichment not so much

• Experiment seemed to show that environment has a big impact on learning

Cooper and Zubek

• Replicated Tryon and raised mice like Hebb and Hymovitch

• Combined the smart and dumb mice experiment and the cage-type experiment, except for the motor part because the motor part didn’t show any effect

• Found that in a normal environment the smart mice do better than the dumb mice - but in a restricted environment the smart and dumb mice did the same, and in the enriched environment they did about the same

• Conclusion: genetic factors only apply to specific environments and tell us nothing about how those people would achieve in other environments

• Concluded that genetic factors are a variable, NOT a determinant

• The environment tends to wipe out any innate genetic differences

Dyspedagogia

Poor teaching or lack of good teaching

5 Components of Kirk’s Definition

• Subaverage achievement

• Intra-individual differences

• Reference to psychological processing problems as causal factors

• Suggestion of cerebral dysfunction as a possible causal factor

• Exclusionary factors

NACHC (US Dept. of Ed.) Definition of Learning Disabilities

Big change added to this definition was the addition of “children”

PL 94-142

• Originated in 1977

• Originally called “education for all handicapped children”

• The law that guarantees a free appropriate public education to every child in America

• This is why people with disabilities get educated in schools

Barbara Bateman

Her definition of learning disabilities: “Children with learning disabilities are those who manifest an educationally significant discrepancy between their estimated intellectual potential and their actual level of performance related to the basic disorders in the learning process”

Learning Disabilities

Specific challenges in different areas of academics and school related executive functions

Intellectual Disabilities

• IQ below 70

• Adaptive deficits

• Develops before age of 22

Splinter Skills vs. Talents

People with disabilities may excel in one specific area (Savant syndrome), but it is akin to a neurotypical person having a talent

Averagarian Thinking

The tendency to judge people against a norm or a average

Ergodic Theory

The theory that you can’t figure out anything about the individual by looking at the average of the group

The Matthew Effect

The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer

NJCLD (National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities) Definition of LD, 1981

Definition is a little less specific but more or less the same as the definition that has been used

LDA (Association for Children with Learning Disabilities) Definition of LD, 1986

• Very broad definition of LD

• Added the idea of a non-verbal disability

• Changed their name to include not just children

OSEP Statement, 2001 (Office of Special Education Programs)

This statement defining learning disabilities indicated that in 2001, people were still speaking as if the very existence of LD was being debated

DSM-5-TR Definition of LD

Added different levels of severity to the definition of LD:

• Mild

• Moderate

• Severe

Dysnomia

Impairs an individual’s ability to recall words, names, or objects

Neurological Soft Signs

Peculiar and minor abnormalities that nobody knew where they came from but they knew that something was wrong

Ptosis

Drooping of upper eyelid

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)

• Uses magnets to look at the brain’s water content

• Allows doctors to distinguish between normal brain tissue and “something else”

Positive Emission Tomography (PET)

• Doctors use special dye with radioactive tracers that are absorbed by different parts of the body, and the areas with more chemical activity going on have more of the dye

• This shows which parts of the brain are more active

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

• Shows metabolism of the brain

• Measures what parts of the brain are being used during a task

• In normal people, used to show difference of brain activity between adolescents and adults

Homunculus

• A figurative representation, in distorted human form, of the relative sizes of the sensory areas in the brain that correspond to particular sensory parts of the body

• The bigger the portion, the more sensitive the body part

Lissencephaly

• Smooth brain

• Caused by not having grooves on the brain

Fissures

Largest grooves in the brain that separate the different lobes

Cerebellum

• Beneath cerebral cortex and is what joins it to the brainstem

• Makes up about 10% of brain mass but has about 50% of neurons

• Regulates behaviors having to do with movement, speech, balance, etc.

Executive Functions

• The ability to regulate one’s behavior through working memory, inner speech, control of emotions and arousal levels, and analysis of problems and communication of problem solutions to others

• A term used to describe a person’s thinking about his or her thinking and learning process (metacognition)

• Frontal lobes are responsible for this

Lobotomy

• Cure of emotional disturbances by severing connection between prefrontal lobe and the rest of the brain

• Was used to try and control violence

• Created by Egas Moniz

Prefrontal Lobe

• Appears to play a critical role in the uniquely human capacity to modulate emotions

• Acts as a manager of emotions by regulating and weighing reactions before acting on them

Frontal Lobe

Responsible for higher cognitive functions such as memory, personality traits, impulse control, problem solving, social interaction, and motor function

Parietal Lobe

• Part of the brain responsible for processing sensory information, spatial awareness, and interpreting visual information

• Located at the top of the brain

• People with damage here have trouble taking in information and processing it

Face Blindness

Those who do not recognize faces as visual stimuli

Occipital Lobe

• Located at the back of the brain

• Responsible for processing visual information such as colors, shapes, and movements

• Damage can result in visual agnosia

Visual Agnosia

Inability to perceive or recognize common objects despite normal vision

Temporal Lobe

• Contains Broca' and Wernicke’s areas

• Region in the brain responsible for processing auditory information, memory, reception, and language

Neurons

Brain cells responsible for sending and receiving information in the brain

Canavan Disease

• Leukodystrophy

• Destruction of the white matter of the brain

• Causes profound intellectual disability due to the lack of a certain enzyme

• Hereditary

• Teratogenic

• Medical

• Environmental

Factors that may contribute to neurological dysfunction

Familiality

• When a condition occurs at a greater-than-chance rate in family relatives

• Implies correlation

Heritability

• The degree to which a condition is genetically transmitted

• Implies causation

Colorado Reading Project

Study that found that 54% of monozygotic twins vs 32% of dizygotic twins shared a learning disability

FMR Gene

• Stands for Fragile X Mental Retardation Gene

• Located on the end of the X chromosome

• Mutations can lead to Fragile X Syndrome

Fragile X Syndrome

• FMR gene is dangling and looks like it will fall off

• Has a lot of distinct features (ex. long face)

• Is #1 cause of autism worldwide

• Is often mistaken for autism

Neurofibromatosis

• Occurs in 1 in 3-4,000 births

• Categorized by growth of tumors and marks on skin - cafe au lait spots

• Tumors are non-cancerous, but they can cause problems

• About 50% of people with this have learning disabilities

Human Genome Project

We can look at the genome and compare the genes of people with various conditions, or compare other factors

Chromosomes 6 and 15

Chromosomes on which we find the marker for dyslexia

Joseph Merrick

Known as the “elephant” due to his severe physical deformities

Teratogenic Factor

• Factors that come from an outside source

• Examples:

  • Illicit drug use

  • Nicotine use

Teratogen

An abnormal growth or malfunction in the fetus

Medical Factors

Medical causes of brain dysfunction that could occur either prenatal, perinatal, or postnatal

• Primary prevention (targets everyone)

• Secondary prevention (targets at-risk)

• Tertiary prevention (treatment)

Three types of prevention of learning disabilities

KTEA-3

• Test that tests for learning disabilities

• An individually-administered measure of academic achievement across multiple areas for individuals in different age ranges

Primary Prevention

• Efforts that society makes that keeps something from happening

• Targets the whole population to avoid a negative outcome

Secondary Prevention

• Efforts that are aimed at catching problems early and stopping them right away

• Tends to look at at-risk groups

Tertiary Prevention

• Essentially treatment

• Trying to take a problem that exists and preventing it from getting worse

CLD

• Cultural and linguistic diversity

• Teachers have to be aware of the cultural difference in their classrooms

Temperament

A behavioral style of responding to people and situations, present from birth

Brazelton Test

• Tests for temperament in neonatal children, 0-30

• Predicts how they will be further in life

• Usually can’t change temperament

Readiness Skills

• The skills that are not innately academic but are the skills needed in order to succeed academically

• Also known as pre-academic skills

• Generic approach

• Specific approach

Two approaches for early identification of learning disabilities

Generic Approach

• Looking at people who have challenges and looking at them as in need of services without differentiating individual learning disabilities

• Better for earlier in life

Specific Approach

• Identifying a child’s specific area of impairment - the specific difficulties they’re having

• Better for a bit later on in life

Response to Intervention Model (RTI)

• Three-tier model that gives everyone services

• Those who respond will get more services, and if they still don’t respond then it will be thought that they have a learning disability

• A way to avoid achievement-intelligence gap, which is a “wait-to-fail” model

• Best practice to use for children with disabilities

• Looks at how children respond to interventions for learning disabilities

Peter Principle

The theory that you are continuously promoted to the level of your incompetence until you hit a block, and that is where you stay

• Tier 1: universal interventions (primary)

• Tier 2: individualized interventions (secondary)

• Tier 3: intensive interventions (tertiary)

RTI three-tier pyramid of interventions

Tier 1: Universal Interventions (Primary)

• Available to all students in a classroom or school

• Can consist of whole-group or individual strategies or supports

• Core instructional interventions

• All students

• Preventative

• Proactive

• Tier 2: Individualized Interventions (Secondary)

• Subset of students receive interventions targeting specific needs

• Targeted group interventions

• Some students (at-risk)

• High efficiency

• Rapid response

• Tier 3: intensive interventions (tertiary)

• Students who are non-responders to tiers 1 and 2 are referred to the RTI team for more intensive interventions

• Intensive, individualized interventions

• Individual students

• Higher intensity

• Longer duration

Curriculum-Based Measurement

• A method teachers use to find out how students are progressing in basic academic areas such as math, reading, writing, and spelling through 1-2 minute assessments

• Can be helpful to parents because it provides current, week-by-week information on the progress that their children are making

• Shown to have better outcomes than other assessments

• Based on student performance, and shows the efficacy of teacher’s teaching method, which allows them to assess and restructure their curriculum accordingly

Twice-Exceptional People

• Have a learning disability

• Academically gifted (IQ over 130)

Concordance-Discordance Model

• Model based on diagnosis rather than testing

• Measures actual cognitive processing strengths and weaknesses

• Should be a significant difference between a person’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses

• If academic achievement is too low for your processing strength, there is discordance

• There should be correlation between processing weakness and poor academic achievement

Discrepancy/Consistency Model

• There must be (we are testing for):

  • Discrepancy between high and low processing scores

  • Discrepancy between high processing and low academic achievement

  • Consistency between low processing scores and low academic achievement

Metacognition

• A student’s ability to think about, preplan, and monitor performance on an educational task

• Thinking about thinking

• Two different ways to look at it:

  • Source of disability

  • Treatment for disability

Stop Skill

• When you have the feeling or urge to do something, and you have the ability to fend it off and say no to it

  • S: Stop

  • T: Take a step back

  • O: Observe the situation

  • P: Proceed mindfully