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OTCS 2213

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

• Define Learning Difficulties

• Describe the different types of Learning
Difficulties
• Explain the causes of Learning Difficulties
• Explain the medical management of Learning
Difficulties

NURFAEISHAH BT MOHD KHALID

PROGRAM JURUPULIH PERUBATAN CARAKERJA
ILKKM SG. BULOH

DEFINITION LD
• A disorder affecting a person’s ability to
interpret visual and auditory stimuli and to
DEFINITION integrate information processed by the brain.

• Difficulties result in spoken and written

language, reading, calculating numbers,
spelling, attending and motor planning.

Cont… Cont…
• LD is not a single disorder. It is a term that refers to
• Neurological disorder that affects the brain's
a group of disorders that affect a child’s ability to
ability to receive, process, store and respond to
master school tasks, process information and
information. communicate effectively

• LD refers to a heterogeneous group of disorders • Difficulty a person of at least average intelligence

manifested by significant difficulties in the has in acquiring basic academic skills.
acquisition and use of listening, speaking,
reading, writing, reasoning, or mathematic • often complicated by associated disorders such as
abilities (Hammil, 1990). attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

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TYPES OF LEARNING
DIFFICULTIES
1) Input
• This is the information perceived through the senses,
such as visual and auditory perception.
• Difficulties with visual perception
• can cause problems with recognizing the shape,
position and size of items seen.
• Difficulties with auditory perception
• difficult to screen out competing sounds in order to
focus on one of them, such as the sound of the
teacher's voice.
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1. LD encompass a heterogeneous group disorders.
2. LD are intrinsic to the individual and have a
neurological basis.
3. LD are characterized by a discrepancy between ability
and achievement.
4. LD are not result of other disorders or problems, but
individuals with LD may have other special needs as
well.
TYPES:
a) Information processing deficits
b) Specific learning difficulties
c) Disorders of speaking and listening
d) Auditory processing disorder
2) Integration
• Difficulties to interprets, categorizes, place in a
sequence, or relates the input to previous learning.
• Students with problems in these areas may be:
– unable to tell a story in the correct sequence
– unable to memorize sequences of information
such as the days of the week
– able to understand a new concept but unable to
generalize it to other areas of learning
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3) Storage
• Problems with memory can occur with short-
term/working memory, or with long-term memory.
• Most memory difficulties occur in the area of short-
term memory, which can make it difficult to learn
new material without many more repetitions than
is usual.
• Difficulties with visual memory can impede
learning to spell.
• Difficulties with motor abilities can cause
problems with gross and fine motor skills:
• People with gross motor difficulties may be clumsy,
that is, they may be prone to stumbling, falling, or
bumping into things.
• They may also have trouble running, climbing, or
learning to ride a bicycle.
• People with fine motor difficulties may have
trouble buttoning shirts, tying shoelaces, or with
handwriting.
• Affecting any part of the reading process, including
difficulty with accurate and/or fluent word
recognition, word decoding, reading rate, prosody
(oral reading with expression), and reading
comprehension.
• Difficulty with phonemic awareness (the ability to
break up words into their component sounds), and
difficulty with matching letter combinations to
specific sounds (sound-symbol correspondence).
– Examples : BA + CA =????,SU+SU=???
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4) Output
• Information comes out of the brain either through
words, that is, language output, or through muscle
activity, such as gesturing, writing or drawing.
• Difficulties with language output can create
problems with spoken language, for example:
• answering a question on demand, in which one
must retrieve information from storage 
organize the thoughts  put the thoughts into
words before we speak.
• Reading disability (Dyslexia)
• Math disability (Dyscalculia)
• Writing disability (Dysgraphia)
• Motor planning disability (Dyspraxia)
• Dyslexia is an impairment in the ability to
translate written images.
• Dyslexia is the most common learning disability
in children.
• Most people with dyslexia are of average or
above-average intelligence, but read at levels
significantly lower than expected.
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seeing through dyslexics eyes….

• Impaired written language ability.

• May include impairments in handwriting,
spelling, organization of ideas, and composition.
• Dysgraphia is a difficulty in expressing
thoughts in writing and graphing.
• It generally refers to extremely poor
handwriting.
• Examples: Baju=daju, mulut = nulut.

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• A math disability can cause such difficulties as
learning math concepts (such as quantity, place
value, and time).
• Difficulty memorizing math facts, difficulty
organizing numbers, and understanding how
problems are organized on the page.
DYSCALCULIA
 Particular difficulty with subtraction.
 Difficulty using finger counting (slow, inaccurate,
unable to immediately recognise finger
configurations
 Difficulty decomposing numbers (e.g.
recognizing that 10 is made up of 4 and 6
 Anxiety about or negative attitude towards
maths (caused by the dyscalculia.
 Trouble learning and understanding reasoning
methods and multi-step calculation procedures.
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DYSCALCULIA
 Delay in counting. Less understanding of basic
counting principles than their peers.
 Delay in using counting strategies for addition. Dyscalculic
children tend to keep using inefficient strategies for
calculating addition facts much longer than their peers.
 Difficulties in memorizing arithmetic facts. Dyscalculic
children have great difficulty in memorizing simple
addition, subtraction and multiplication facts (eg. 5 + 4 =
9), and this difficulty persists up to at least the age of
thirteen.
 Lack of “number sense”. Dyscalculic children may have a
fundamental difficulty in understanding quantity .
comparing two numbers (which is bigger, 7 or 9?.
DYSCALCULIA
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DYSCALCULIA Example :
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 ???

???
• Examples:
1+2 =????

• Examples: 12 23
+ 8 + 17
110 310

Disorders of speaking and

listening
• Variety of difficulties with motor skills.
• The children may show difficulty in:
• Can cause difficulty with single step tasks such – Shifting topics of conversation
as combing hair or waving goodbye. – Difficulty with the sequencing of words,
• Or multi-step tasks like brushing teeth or sentences, or sounds
getting dressed. – Slurred words
• Or establishing spatial relation such as being – Articulation problems
able to accurately position one object in relation
to another.

Auditory processing disorder

• The children are often:
– Cannot remember the oral directions given
(auditory memory) CAUSES
– Cannot sound out words or blend sounds into
words (phonemic synthesis)
– Cannot block out background noise (speech-
in-noise)
– Cannot remember the sequencing of sounds,
words or numbers (auditory sequencing)

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The causes for learning

Medical Management
difficulties
• Heredity • Surgery
• Problems during pregnancy and birth • Medications
• Accidents after birth

• Behavioral Factors

• Social environment factors

• Cognitive Factors

Celebrity with LD… Celebrity with LD…

Jaimmie Oliver
Jim Carrey Tom Cruise Steven Spielberg ADHD with
ADHD with LD Dyslexia Dyslexia Dyslexia