Q.How can we identify students with learning disabilities?

Students with learning disabilities show characteristic symptom patterns across writing/reading/speaking, attention, spatial-temporal orientation, motor coordination, social judgement, and perception — despite having normal intelligence and adequate opportunity. …

Students with learning disabilities can be identified by recognising a distinctive pattern of symptoms — one that occurs despite the student having average to superior intelligence, adequate sensory-motor systems, and adequate opportunities to learn, which is precisely what distinguishes a genuine learning disability from poor performance caused by low intelligence, sensory impairment, or lack of opportunity.

Learning-disabled students commonly show several kinds of difficulty, often in combination. They may have difficulty writing letters, words, and phrases, reading text aloud, and speaking, along with listening problems even though their hearing itself is not impaired, and they often develop unusual approaches to learning strategies and plans. They frequently show disorders of attention — being easily distracted and unable to sustain focus for long — often accompanied by hyperactivity, such as constant movement or restlessly manipulating objects. Many show poor space orientation and an inadequate sense of time — getting lost easily in new surroundings, confusing directions such as left/right or up/down, and being poorly timed for routine activities. Poor motor coordination and manual dexterity are also common, showing up as poor balance or difficulty with everyday tasks like sharpening a pencil, handling doorknobs, or learning to ride a bicycle. Such students frequently fail to understand and follow oral directions, and they often misjudge social relationships — struggling to tell which classmates are friendly, and failing to read body language correctly. Perceptual disorders across the visual, auditory, tactual, and kinesthetic senses are also typical — for example, failing to distinguish a call-bell from a telephone ring, not because of any actual defect in sensory acuity, but because of a failure to use that sensory information correctly. A fairly large number of learning-disabled children specifically show dyslexia, marked by difficulty copying letters and words and frequent confusion between visually similar forms such as 'b' and 'd,' or 'p' and 'q.' …