Psychoeducational Assessments Edmonton | What Are Learning Disabilities?
Hi there. My name’s Dr. Kelly Clark, and today I’d like to talk about learning disabilities. The term most used is specific learning disabilities, and the reason why that is, is because it’s a protected legal term for individuals who actually have been diagnosed with a learning disability and struggled with school all through their lives, but maybe it didn’t even have it didn’t have an awareness of it at least at the level that it was a learning disability until adulthood.
Oftentimes, specific learning disabilities are diagnosed in school age years when kids are young. Teachers are experts at observing the, the behaviors of kids, and so are parents as well. And so oftentimes the, the child will come to see somebody like a school psychologist, and a determination of whether there is or is not a specific learning disability is made. So what is a specific learning disability?
A specific learning disability is an inability to be able to function in reading, writing, and math at an age appropriate level. So with, with students that are struggling in this regard, we’ll see that they are typically having difficulties that are not consistent with kids their age. So I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the, the indications that there might be a learning disability.
So, like I said in the beginning substantially lower than kids their age. So you might have a six or 7-year-old child who is having, you know, they, they’re in grade two, but they’re actually functioning at beginning kindergar garden. Now, typically, specific learning disabilities are not diagnosed until about grade three, late grade two. And the reason why that is, is because it could be lots of factors including not getting the kids to school, maybe sickness, you get COVID, something like that, like a, a grand worldwide event obviously contributed to kids having delays in learning.
And so in those examples and, and circumstances, sometimes there might be just because the, the student was missing, wasn’t exposed to the curriculum, and they have delays and, or, you know, that there’s medical issues or something else attributing to their learning challenges like an intellectual disability, which I’ll talk about at the end. So, a specific learning disability has to have been observed for at least six months.
And you should notice that that there has been difficulties in at least one area of reading, writing, and mathematics. And I could go into more detail, but it could be things even like really slow reading speed difficulties with reading comprehension. Often, I think as, as individuals growing up, you know, in the last 50 years, we we hear, we think of dyscalculia or dyslexia or these kind of things as indications of a learning disability, dyslexia probably is, is quite common for a lot of people to, to know.
And one of the myths of dyslexia is, is it’s not just about mixing up letters. In fact, it’s very developmentally consistent you know, and including my boys you know, as I observed them to mix up B’S and D’s, these kind of things. So it’s very developmentally appropriate. No need to get very nervous and, and, and fearful if your son or your daughter is struggling with noticing symbols in letters and mixing up the nines and getting them backwards. And, and you know, seven is, is written the wrong way, or c is backwards, or B’s and D’s.
And so often, you know, teachers will teach that bed principle, so B looks like this draw, you know, do a bed for your kids to help them remember, and B, looks like this, and D looks like that bed. And so that helps. So sometimes, so often it’s, it has to do with, you know, short-term memory and repetitive learning for a lot of kids, until developmentally, they pick the skills up.
What’s clear with, with specific learning disabilities is despite targeted interventions, despite exposure to curriculum, despite having the help and attending school and not having, you know, other medical concerns or an intellectual disability, they’re still not growing at an age appropriate level. So that’s another criteria that that should be there. We should typically observe that these problems have started to develop in school age years.
So, you know, generally if somebody says, yeah, when I was 40 years old, I developed a reading comprehension difficulty. Well unless that was related to some medical difficulty or something else that’s, that’s not you know, consistent with a diagnosis of a specific learning disability, you should often see the difficulties forming in school age years. And that’s gonna be apparent to parents and, and clearly to teachers because they’ve got often, you know, 22 other kids that they’re comparing or more.
So there are these kind of difficulties that you should notice with your children as they’re growing and there’s deficits or weaknesses in these areas. Now, back to dyslexia. The term in the, the more, the medical term that, that, that is used in the DSM five is if there is a specific disability in reading, it’s called a specific learning disability with impairment in reading. And so that category can include lots of difficulties, including, you know, again, a grade six that’s still switching up the B’s and D’s.
That’s when we start getting concerned that the letters are still being you know, mixed around, or they still don’t have the ability to blend sounds together, like B and L and bl blue. They might individually go B oh blue, that inability to blend and synthesize letters together could be indicative of a learning disability at grade six.
They should have that down. In fact, they should have that down a lot earlier, like grade three. So, well, kindergarten is actually, actually when that skill starts to develop and should be noticeably consistent with their peers. So the inability to also decode and break words up and sound them out phonetically. So for example, the word Wednesday, I mean, where, where’s the D? And Wednesday, when we say Wednesday, there’s no D.
So people that are, are effective with spelling have learned to use skills in reading, like decoding, breaking the word up, we call it segmenting, and being able to articulate or sound the word out. So I learned how to spell Wednesday by going wed ness day. So in that case, I could go, okay, there’s a D in there. You don’t say it when you’re, you’re speaking it, but then I could correctly spell it.
So, invariably, kids who have phonetic difficulties, difficulty sounding, articulating words, have problems, spelling. So if you notice there’s difficulties in spelling along with the reading, oftentimes there’s there can be a global difficulty. It’s not just reading, but writing and mathematics are a challenge as well. When there are difficulties with writing and mathematics, we call those impairments in mathematics and impairments in written expression.
So difficulties with mathematics, again, these are, you know, kids that are having difficulties with math fluency, which is the ability to, you know, seamlessly and fairly quickly add up basic numbers like five plus three, two plus seven. And you’ll notice that their, their speed with doing this, their math fluency is quite slow. They really struggle with that. They may struggle with the symbology of mathematics. They’re, they’re always constantly adding when they see a subtract sign. So these kind of things, when they’re having difficulties with the representations of what the symbols mean, again, can be clearly related to this reading impairment, but we can see connections between them.
But a mathematics disorder are things like that, difficulties with math fluency, difficulties with math reasoning, the ability to use logic and apply that to a mathematical principle. These are things that we will struggle numeracy you know, the, the inability to understand basic number facts and and reasoning using the mathematical ideas. So these things can be issues that, that kids with a mathematics disorder have.
Also, when we’re looking at written expression, kids and adults that have difficulty with written expression, again, back to the idea that I alluded to in my previous video. Well, nowadays it’s much better. I think adults and, and teachers and, and parents do a much better job letting kids know that just because you might struggle in school doesn’t mean you’re not smart. So, one of the reasons why do we do IQ testing is to rule out that their difficulties with, with reading, writing, and math are related to intellectual difficulties.
So one of the benefits to an IQ test is we can rule out, yeah, they’re, they’re not somebody that struggles intellectually. They’re at least average, you know, to above average iq. So we’ve ruled that out. So what’s left is they’re struggling, functioning academically, which is one of the definitions of a learning disability, is that they’re considerably lower and not functioning in an academic way with reading, writing, and math, similar to their peers. An adult to may carry that right into adulthood and notice that they always struggled.
So again, it should be observed in school age years. They might have used compensatory strategies to work through it and are functional, but they’ll have always noticed they struggled with pronouncing words. Big new words really struggle really trip them up, for example. So just because you’re an adult and, and made it through school doesn’t mean that there’s not a learning disability present, especially if you struggled academically all through the school.
And then secondly, we ruled out that intelligence is a factor affecting school performance. So, back to written expression. Written expression is individuals that are struggling with organizing their thoughts and expressing them on paper, putting them into words. So difficulties with organization. Also difficulties with grammar. Punctuations. Often you’ll see no capitalization, no periods, no commas. You also see things like the words are tightly compacted. Writing is illegible, very difficult to read.
Fortunately, my writing is pretty illegible, but I don’t meet that criteria. ’cause We don’t have just one criteria alone, meeting criteria for a disorder of written expression. You need several of these indicators to show that there is at least one, but usually several indicators that there is difficulty. So with ri written expression, poor sloppy writing, squished together words, difficulties, putting thoughts into words, can’t organize their thoughts difficulties with, with margins.
So you might notice that they come short of the margin as they’re writing these kind of things, or they, or they’re, they can’t stay on lines. These kind of things can be related to it. Also, slow writing speed, extremely slow writing. Hand gets very tired. You know, I’ve had highly, highly intelligent individuals who came in for, for a psychoeducational assessment with me.
Very smart individuals with a learning disability, a specific learning disability in, you know, an impairment in writing. And so they needed accommodations in university to have you know, a a, a dictation software so that they could speak and the words would be produced on the page, alleviating the demand of writing, also helping them to organize their thoughts. So often the benefit of getting diagnosed with a specific learning disability is now we can target interventions to help them out.
So instead of that child feeling bad about themselves as they’re growing up, living into adulthood, always thinking that they weren’t intelligent and meanwhile they weren’t, is we can have the assessment, the psychoeducational assessment, determine if there is a learning impairment and have targeted interventions at school, more time on tests, having dictation software, having other accommodations in school being able to help them so that they can learn differently.
So an important distinction is, you know, often people don’t like the term learning disability. And I will say to kids that, that I do say that, you know, you’ve got a learning challenge is that you just need to learn differently. You’re a smart boy or girl, you’re definitely intelligent but you need to learn differently. So these learning differences are important to track, to identify early on so that we can intervene and provide targeted interventions.
Because in the standard, in psychology and, and in practice with psychiatry is early intervention is, is almost always better. One final disability is an intellectual disability. An intellectual disability is where the difficulties in school with reading, writing and math are attributable to an intellectual disability. And what I mean by that is that an IQ test, a standardized IQ test performed one-on-one with a student has shown that they have, IM have impairments.
They’re significantly lower than most kids or adults or adolescents their age on a standardized test of, of verbal language-based skills nonverbal reasoning, short-term memory, and processing speeds. So often these four areas are, are put together to come up with an overall IQ score. And so when that IQ score is 75 or lower it is indicative that there’s a considerable intellectual challenge going on for this, this child, adolescent or adult.
So a standard score of 100, when we, when somebody says, yeah, I’ve got a hundred iq, they would be exactly at the 50th percentile, meaning that 50 out of a hundred people would’ve done better than them, and they would’ve done better than 50 out of a hundred as well. They’re right in the middle if you have a hundred iq. So clearly, if you go up, somebody says, yep, I, I got an IQ test from a psychologist and I have 110 iq. Well, they’re clearly getting to be above average. They’re at the 75th percentile.
And if somebody says, I have 120 iq, then they’re at the 91st percentile. They, they did better than 91 out of a hundred people their age. So individuals with, with getting IQ testing and are showed to be at that 75 or lower are there needs to be a query if there’s an intellectual disability, one more facet of an intellectual disability.
So as you can have an IQ say of 75 and lower, well 75, and within that, that seventies range, and yet function very well in your job or the workplace, then that is called your adaptive skills, your everyday skills. So if you’re able to function in a job with a 75 iq then you’re not considered to have an intellectual disability, although you’re clearly falling within a, a borderline range of intelligence. Your ability to think and reason should be understandably lower in comparison to others.
So, you know, a, a boss that has somebody with a lower IQ hopefully shows some understanding and some empathy with this individual and will change how they explain instructions and, and those kind of things. Intellectual disabilities have to have you know, people with more understanding and accommodations both at school and in work.
So those are the, those are the areas that I wanted to talk about about disabilities. So individuals with below 75, and then when you get into sixties and fifties iq, these individuals simply will not be able to function in society like a typical individual and will have what we call functional impairments that will struggle with everyday adaptive needs, like managing to get to the bus or, or even sustaining employment.
So an intellectual disability is low IQ combined with low adaptive skills or everyday skills. For more information on that, on learning disabilities, specific learning disabilities, come to drkellyclarke.com. Thank you for your time.