Strategies: Learning Disabilities

Structured instruction involves systematically teaching information that has been chunked into manageable pieces. Many adults with learning disabilities have difficulty processing large amounts of information, such as complex concepts and multistep procedures. Information should be broken into smaller “chunks” and/or steps, then these chinks should be taught systematically in sequential stages designed to promote mastery at each level.

Small steps are more readily accomplished and will help keep the learner engaged, However, it is critical that you help the learner make connections within the smaller units of information. Carefully define the immediate task, and verbally and visually break it into as many steps as necessary to “chunk” it into manageable tasks.

Once the information is chunked, you teaching structure should consider the diverse learning characteristics of a variety of adults. Teaching approaches that emphasize unstructured exploration, discussion, or group investigation during the early acquisition of new skills or information are not likely to be successful. Adults with learning disabilities may not have the questioning strategies and background knowledge required to independently organize new information in ways that help them understand and remember it.

Once information has been introduced, the learner should have structured opportunities to practice applying the information. Good practice is a balance between repetition and varied applications that allow the learner to explore the different ways in which a skill can be applied. Practice provides the learner with opportunities to develop automatically in skill performance and to think about new skill or knowledge and its application. Begin a practice activity by demonstrating and completing the task; then gradually shift responsibility to the learner. Verbally walk through steps required to learn the task as the adult works, and gradually shift the responsibility of talking through the task to the learner.

Connected instruction shows the learner how information in and among units and lessons are linked to the learning process and to the learner’s goals.

To help the learner see the relevance of learning a particular skill or information, explain how the objectives of a current lesson relate to the previous lessons. Provide a transition to the current lesson verbally and visually, showing how a specific unit or lesson fits into the overall plan for accomplishing learning goals. The unit maps created during the planning phase can supply a road map for what has been learned and what will be learned. When this map is constructed and expanded with the learner (it can be posted on the wall or kept in a folder or notebook), it can be used to draw attention to connections in and between the information in that has been learned. It can also be used to review and discuss progress.

Informative instruction involves making sure that the learner is informed about how the learning process works, what is expected during the instructional situation, and how he or she can improve learning and performance.

The learner may not have developed the self-monitoring and self-evaluating strategies to track his of her learning progress. Therefore, you should keep the learner informed of when, where, how and under what conditions learning or performance occur. You should cue critical points for goal setting, monitoring goal attainment, and gaining commitment throughout all stages of instruction.

Communicate to the learner each session’s organization and expectations. Begin each instructional session by taking 2 to 3 minutes to construct a visual organizer with the learner. Reiterate current goals and sub-goals, and ask questions, giving the learner an opportunity to put the information in his or her own words. You can avoid confusion and ambiguity if the leaner knows what is expected and how to accomplish it.

The learner needs to understand that if he or she is performing a skill correctly or incorrectly, particularly during the early stages of learning and practice. Feedback can help the learner better understand his or her skill performance; however, many adults with learning disabilities are sensitive to feedback because it often indicates failure. Therefore, stress that feedback does not always mean failure, rather it is like coaching.

Inform the learner about his or her performance as it is happening. Tell the learner what was done well and why, as well as what was done incorrectly, and why and how to improve it. You can prompt the learner to reflect on his or her performance and to give self-feedback for your comment. Good feedback does not have to wait until the learner has completed a task or asked for help and does not simply tell the learner how to perform the skill-good feedback challenges the adult to be reflective about his or her performance.

Explicit instruction involves providing detailed explanations about models to the leaner about how to approach, think about, perform, and evaluate learning and performance.

Adults with learning disabilities need a significantly greater amount of detail than other learners do. Therefore, you need to make each learning step apparent through detailed explanations. Learning of information cannot be left to chance; everything must be explained, and multiple models of correct performance must be provided. The learner needs to receive clear explanations, be shown hot to link new information to previous knowledge, and be shown how to think about, use, and manipulate information.

The first step of explicit instruction is to create an advance organizer to foster an awareness of the overall topic, or big picture, of the information that the adult can expect to learn. The second step is to shift the focus to smaller parts, while always relating the smaller parts back to the bigger picture, as reflected through the advance organizer. The learner can benefit from a description of what he or she should do as well as model of how performance should “look.”

As you model, describe your thinking and you performance. Good learners are conscious of both their thinking about their actions and the impact of their actions on tasks. Before asking the learner to perform a task, therefore, explain and demonstrate correct performance. It is unrealistic to expect the learner to independently “discover” correct performance. However, you can lead the learner through explicit guided discovery using scaffolded questioning.

Explicit instruction also ensures that the learner does not begin practicing a procedure incorrectly and then have to unlearn the procedure.

Finally, explicit instruction concludes with checks and reviews to ensure that the learner has mastered individual pieces of information as well as the bigger picture, and the relationship among these.

Direct instruction is characterized by high rates of teacher or tutor leadership and control during the initial stages of information acquisition, followed by careful monitoring of the learner’s performance as he or she gradually assumes control of and masters the information.

You should provide direct, face-to-face instruction and guidance to ensure that the learner has acquired the correct information and is thinking about and using the information correctly. This type of step-by-step leadership should guide and show the learner how to effectively learn and perform.

The learner should avoid independent work until he or she thoroughly understands what will be practiced. However, you should carefully arrange practice activities to ensure appropriate levels of guided-to-independent practice and feedback. You should monitor the learner’s progress frequently to ensure that the learner is not incorrectly practicing what has been taught. Although you assume the initial responsibility for guiding a learner’s performance, you should gradually turn over the control to the learner as he or she progresses.

Scaffolded instruction involves the frequent use of connected questions and collaboratively constructed explanations to create a context for learning based on the learner’s prior knowledge. The learner’s prior knowledge can be used as a foundation to which new information can be linked.

Scaffolded instruction ensures that what the learner already knows is used as a guide to determine the next step for instruction. Scaffolded instruction is direct and interactive teaching that provides guidance through questioning. Following questioning, you should prompt the learner to ask and answer questions about the task to gain information about how she or he is thinking about it. This interactive questioning creates a context that can be used to make instructional decisions about what and how to teach.

Your critical questions provide new information based on the learner’s responses. You should ask additional questions to clarify, and then continue to interactively shape learning. To provide scaffolded instruction, however, you should have an expert understanding of the critical information and all its component parts that the adult is expected to learn and to weave into his or her background knowledge. Your questions and responses are carefully shaped by this expert knowledge.

Intensive instruction involves helping learners to maintain a high degree of attention and response during instructional sessions that are scheduled as frequently as possibly.

Instruction should occur frequently and demand a high degree of learner attention and response, as well as your evaluation and feedback. Literacy programs should offer instruction as often as possible, and instruction that is offered should fully engage learners’ attention. Intensity also involves frequent exposure and opportunities for practice. Excessive drilling is rarely the answer; but frequent practice and application of a skill is essential for learners to master and generalize information. It is rarely enough for a learner who is practicing a basic skill in learning to read to have the opportunity to practice this skill only once or twice a week. Practicing something new once a week is like learning it over again every time.

Intensity during instruction is achieved by a progressive pace, frequent question/answer interactions, and frequent activities that require a physical response (for example, point, write, raise your hand, repeat). Intensity can be achieved through reflective or open-ended activities if the activities are focused on an outcome, engage interest, and maintain the learner’s attention.

Process-sensitive instruction involves reshaping the activities within the instructional sequence to take into consideration various cognitive barriers that might inhibit learning.

Activities and instructional sequences should be sensitive to the information-processing demands of the task and to the range of information-processing characteristics of adults. The broad sequence of teaching procedures should take into consideration a variety of information-processing demands, including acquiring, storing, and retrieving information, and demonstrating competence.

For example, instructional activities that enhance information processing include prompting metacognition, reducing memory load, modeling, prompting verbal elaboration and rehearsal, teaching strategies that show adults how to evaluate tasks, select and use needed skills, and checking accuracy.

Additional examples are as follows:

1. If the learner has difficulty acquiring information, he or she is likely to have difficulty distinguishing important from the unimportant information or checking for understanding. These difficulties are likely to prevent the learner from fully profiting from observing, listening, or reading. To address this, you can cue important information, incorporate frequent checks for comprehension, questioning, and paraphrasing. If the learner has difficulty storing information, he or she is likely to have difficulty committing information to memory or recording information in notes. To address this you can help learners build mnemonic devices or develop cue cards for remembering critical information. If the learner has difficulty retrieving information that has been acquired and stored, he or she is likely to have difficulty during instruction linking learned information to required tasks, knowing when to use specific skills and strategies, answering questions, or finding information in notes. To address this, you can:
   • teach the conditions for using information, help the learner identify or create links between tasks and know information, frequently review how tasks and know information relate, provide organizers that show context and relationships, and
   • provide direct practice in applying information to a variety of tasks and situations.
2. If the learner has difficulty demonstrating what has been learned, he or she is likely to have difficulty during instruction constructing sentences, paragraphs, editing, completing assignments, and taking tests. To address this, you can model and shape correct ways to demonstrate competence, provide alternate ways to express what has been learned, or provide task monitors to ensure assignment completion.

Accommodating instruction involves providing specific and general adaptations that are legally required to reduce or eliminate the impact of a learning disability on successful learning and performance.

Accommodations are legally required adaptations that reduce or eliminate the impact of information-processing difficulties on learning and the consequences of the difficulties on the adult’s life. Specific instructional practices that characterize process-sensitive instruction may be judged a legal accommodation.

Legally required accommodations are provided at each stage of learning. They are directly related to the nature of the disability and should be determined from the evaluator’s report of the learner’s diagnostic test results. In addition to using specific, legally required accommodations for a learner based on results of the learner’s diagnostic evaluation, you may find it helpful to routinely include general accommodations that reduce information-processing barriers at each stage of instruction. For example, it is helpful if the learner has an opportunity to process the same information in multiple ways – visually, auditorally, interactively, and physically. For the learner, this means that the information is heard, visually displayed, discussed and acted on through the completion of notes, tables, organizers, or other methods that engage the learner in actively thinking about the information.

Evaluated instruction involves adapting instruction based on an assessment of the learner’s progress and his or her response to previous attempts at instruction.

Evaluation, either formal or informal, should begin the moment a goal is set. Because they are embedded in the instructional process, evaluation activities should provide information about what the adult is learning, how he or she is learning, and which instructional procedures need to be adapted or revisited. Sometimes instructional procedures simply need to be more thoroughly implemented or intensified. At the earlier stages of instruction, evaluation is as simple as regularly checking to be sure that desirable and realistic goals have been set. As instruction progresses to describing and modeling and to prompting practice and skill performance, evaluation should be embedded in all activities to determine if instructional procedures and sequences are working. The learner may not always be aware of difficulties he or she is having or how to express concerns. Regular evaluation can determine whether the learner understands tasks and performance requirements. This information can then be used to adjust instruction.

Generalizable instruction involves using activities before, during, and after information has been mastered both to ensure continued application of the information and to increase the learner’s success outside of the literacy setting.

Generalization refers to how well learners use information outside the literacy program to increase their success in life. Instruction for generalization is not something that is completed only after information has been mastered. Rather, it is the ongoing organization of activities throughout the entire instructional sequence that forecasts and ensures thinking and practice related to the goal of generalization.

Before beginning instruction, you should link the learners’ needs to literacy goals that you have collaboratively established with the learner. As instruction begins, provide examples of how the information that is being learned will be used in the learner’s everyday life and propose new situations. The learner will benefit from seeing multiple models of the information used in different situation. Practice should move to real-life applications as soon as possible and should include opportunities that require the learner to adapt the information for use under different circumstances. After the learner has mastered the information, provide specific generalizations activities that involve planning how information might be used, using information outside the literacy program under “safe” conditions, planning for long-term use of the information, and ongoing monitoring of how the information is being used and adapted for success.

Enduring instruction means that the program providers acknowledge and commit the time necessary to ensure that learners master the information and use it to increase their successes in life.

Instruction for adults with learning disabilities often needs to be provided over a long period of time. In fact, practitioners who are considered effective with adults with learning disabilities have been described as relentless. Because mastery of critical information will require more time for adults with learning disabilities than for other learners, you must plan for an extended instructional journey if mastery is to be attained. Even after an adult has learned a particular strategy or “chunk” or information, you may need to provide cumulative reviews to help him or her adapt and extend its use to new situations.

The following is a list of common characteristics of an LD student. Conditions must be persistent over a long period of time. Presence of these conditions does not necessarily mean a person is learning disabled.

Reading Skills

• Poor decoding skills
• Poor reading fluency
• Slow reading rate
• Lack of self-monitoring reading skills
• Poor comprehension and/or retention
• Difficulty identifying important ideas in context
• Extreme difficulty building ideas and images
• Difficulty integrating new ideas to existing knowledge
• Weak vocabulary skills
• Extreme difficulty understanding words or grammar
• Difficulty recognizing high frequency words
• Oral comprehension is noticeably stronger than reading comprehension
• Extreme difficulty focusing attention on the printed marks
• Difficulty controlling eye movements across the page
• Wavy or shimmering pages not attributable to poor vision

Spelling Skills

• Phonological awareness is noticeably stronger than spelling ability
• Frequent spelling errors of high frequency words
• Extreme difficulty with homonyms and/or regular spelling patterns
• No understanding of the relationship of phonics to written language
• No understanding of common spelling rules
• Inadequate understanding of phonics even with instruction

Written Expression Skills

• Poor writing fluency
• Unable to compose complete, grammatical sentences
• Difficulty organizing written information
• Poor  handwriting
• Extremely poor alignment
• Inability to take notes or copy information from a book or the board
• Oral expression is noticeably stronger than written expression
• Extremely weak proofreading skills

Oral Language Skills

• Inability to hear small differences between sounds, not attributable to a hearing loss, particularly vowel sounds
• Difficulty articulating thoughts or ideas orally
• Difficulty pronouncing words
• Inability to blend sounds together to form words
• Difficulty listening and responding to a series of directions
• Disorganized recall of facts or details

Mathematical Skills

• Poor mathematical fluency
• Difficulty memorizing multiplication tables
• Difficulty identifying multiples and/or factors
• Poor basic calculation skills
• Difficulty understanding word or application problems
• Poor understanding of mathematical concepts
• Difficulty sorting out irrelevant information
• Lower visual perceptual and visual-spatial ability
• Inability to transfer basic mathematical concepts to solve problems with unpredictable information
• Inability to use basic facts within more complex calculations

Memory Skills

• Extremely weak ability to store and retrieve information efficiently
• Extremely weak ability to hold information for immediate use

Reasoning Skills

• Extremely weak ability to solve problems, particularly when information or procedure is unfamiliar
• Extreme difficulty recognizing, transforming, or using specific information to reach general conclusions

Common Accommodations for Learning Disability include

• Notetaker and/or audio-taped class sessions
• Captioned films
• Extra exam time, alternative testing arrangements (distraction-reduced testing area, chunking one page at a time, reader)
• Visual, aural, and tactile instructional demonstrations
• Computer with voice output, spellchecker, and grammar checker

Teaching Adults with LD workbook

Visual Processing

Language Processing Disorder

Executive Functioning Disorder

Dyslexia

Auditory Processing Disorder

ADHD article