Dyslexia or Learning Disability – 2

In my first post on Dyslexia, I had mentioned that some children will have difficulties in the psychological processes of acquiring language, understanding and using it. Let me mention which are those psychological processes:

• Attention
• Sensory input or sensation
• Perception (integration of all the sensory inputs inside the brain and making sense of them)
• Cognition (understanding the information and associating it with the earlier information/experience and expanding the knowledge bank)
• Memory and retrieval when required
• Expressing this knowledge - either orally, through reading or speech, or in writing

The above steps are involved in any learning. If a child has problem in any of the above mentioned steps, learning becomes difficult. Many children have problem in focussing their attention and sustaining that attention for the required amount of time to understand it. Some of them may have a problem called “Attention deficit Disorder” (ADD) or “Attention Deficit with Hyperactivity Disorder” (ADHD). They will be unable to focus their attention and they will not be able to sit in a place for long. They are very distractible, fidgety and impulsive. They impulsively act without thinking of the consequences that can be dangerous sometimes, like, suddenly crossing the road to fetch a ball or jumping from heights during play etc. Inattentivity, hyperactivity and impulsivity are the hallmarks of ADHD. Any one, two or all the three can be present in a child with ADHD. More on ADHD here. Because of their attention deficit children will not be able to pay attention and learn the expected task.

Once attention is paid, sensory inputs reach the brain and perception occurs. We can make sense of what we have seen or heard or touched or smelt or tasted. This sensation gets associated with the memory of earlier experiences and our knowledge expands. This is the cognition stage. This once again is assimilated with other information and gets stored as memory in different areas of brain. When the information is required to be put to use, our brain retrieves the information.

For all this to happen, the necessary neural pathways in the brain need to be well connected or wired. If there is any problem at any stage of the wiring, learning may not take place properly or what has been learnt may not be recalled when needed.

Since our whole education system demands children to express whatever they have learnt through writing in an exam, many of these children would find it extremely hard to pass. And we readily label them as “dull”, “dumb”, “useless”, “good for nothing” “lazy” and what not? Does any parent or teacher these days have patience to look for the cause of this difficulty? Do they ever wonder why a child, who is otherwise intelligent and smart in other activities, fail to perform in academics? Does any child purposely want to earn the wrath of its parents or teachers? No, definitely not. Not without a strong reason behind it.

Here it is very important for us to distinguish between learning disability per se and learning difficulties that can be due to factors like, any impairment in the functioning of the sensory organs ( blindness, deaf and muteness), due to intellectual impairment or mental retardation, due to emotional deprivation because of family problems, or due to non availability of learning environment at school or at home (lack of infrastructure or facilities, poor teaching, lack of learning support from parents who are illiterates themselves etc), lack of stimulating environment etc. Sometimes vision problems, like, short sight, in young children go unnoticed by elders and children may have lot of problem reading a book or copying from the board because of poor vision. It is important to rule out all these conditions first and then check the child for learning disability.

Children with learning disability typically have average or above average intelligence, but there are glaring discrepancies between their apparent capacity and achievement levels. Since everybody sees ’smartness’ in these children in their oral expression, in the way they collect information about something that interests them (they can reel out the cricket scores of various teams or list all kinds of dinosaurs or all models of motor cars) elders conclude that their low academic achievement is due to their disinterest in the subject or due to sheer laziness. But it is not so.

………………. to be continued