SSPED

1. THREE CRITERIA IN DETERMINING
THE PRESENCE OF LEARNING
DISABILITIES
The following criteria must be present when
assessing children to have learning disabilities:

2. 1. Severe discrepancy between the child’s potential and
actual achievement.
• Learning disabilities is present when mental ability tests and
standardized achievement test results show discrepancy
between general mental ability and achievement in school.
• Children may show learning difficulties that are minor or
temporary, in which case a true learning disability is not present.

3. 2. Exclusions or absence of mental retardation, sensory
impairment and other disabilities.
• The exclusion criterion means that the child has significant
problems that cannot be explained by mental retardation,
sensory impairment like low vision, blindness, hearing
impairment, emotional disturbance or lack of opportunity to
learn

4. 3. Need for special education service
• Teaching the child with learning disabilities involves strategies
that are unique, uncommon and of unusual activity.
• This criteria is meant to keep children who have not had the
opportunity to learn from being classified as learning disabled.
• They need special education services to remediate their
achievement deficiencies.

5. Results of studies (1999) show that there are at least ninety-
nine separate characteristics of children with learning
disabilities.
Learning disabilities may occur within the life span.
The symptoms and characteristics can be manifested
immediately after birth, during infancy, through the school
years and adulthood.

6. Poses the most difficulty among all the subjects in the curriculum.
o Deficiencies in language skills especially the phonological skills.
1.Reading
 Phonological skills include the ability to rhyme, segment words into syllables
and single sounds, blend sounds together, identify sounds in different
positions in words and manipulate sounds within words.
 Grapheme-phoneme correspondence- how a phoneme is written down, and it
can be a letter of the alphabet, a punctuation mark or other symbol. In short,
the phoneme is the sound and the grapheme is how that sound is expressed (a
symbol).
DYSLEXIA- refers to a disturbance in the ability to learn in
general and the ability to learn to read in particular.

7. 2.Written language
Is often an area of great difficulty for students with learning
disabilities.
• Specific problems include inadequate planning, structure, and
organization; immature or limited sentence structure; limited and
repetitive vocabulary; limited consideration of an audience,
unnecessary or unrelated information or details; and errors in
spelling, punctuation, grammar, and handwriting.
• Student with learning disabilities often lack both the motivation and
the monitoring and evaluation skills considered necessary for good
writing.

8. 3.Spoken language/oral language
Developmental Aphasia- a
condition characterized by loss of
speech functions, often, but not
always due to brain injury
 Is a deficit area for many students with learning disabilities, impacting
both academic and social performance.
• Spoken language issues may include problems identifying and using
appropriate speech sounds, using appropriate words and
understanding word meanings, using and understanding various
sentence structures, and using appropriate grammar and language.
• Other problem areas include understanding underlying meanings, such
as irony or figurative language, and adjusting language for different
uses and purposes.

9. 4.Pragmatics or Social use of Language
 Poses a problems on the ability to carry on a conversation.
• Children with learning disabilities are found to be unable to engage in the
mutual give-and-take in carrying on a conversation.
• Conversation are marked by long silences and inability to respond to the
persons statements or question.
• They tend to answer their on questions before the other person has the
chance to respond and they also make irrelevant comments that make the
other person uncomfortable.

10. 5.Mathematics
Dyscalculia- a math learning disability that impairs an individual’s
ability to represent and process numerical magnitude in a typical
way. Some people call it “math dyslexia.”
Mathematics problems are recognized as second to deficiencies in reading ,
language and spelling.
• Mathematics does not receive the same attention as reading and language arts,
but many students with learning disabilities have unique difficulties in this
subject area.
• Math Calculation-Specific problems may include difficulty understanding size
and spatial relationships and concepts related to direction, place value,
decimals, fractions, and time and difficulty remembering math facts.
• Math Reasoning-Remembering and correctly applying the steps in mathematical
problems (such as the steps involved in long division) and reading and solving
word problems are significant problem areas.

11. 6.Thesechildrentendtofailandberetainedinagradelevel.
Theacademicachievementtendstodecreaseprogressivelyas
thegradelevelincreases.
• Graderetentionreferstothepracticeofkeepingachildinthesamegradefor
morethanoneyear,typically becauseofpoorschoolperformance.Inmost
cases,parentsandeducatorsretainstudentsbecausetheyhavenotmastered
theskillsneededtobesuccessfulatthenextgradelevel.

12. 7.Behavior problems remains consistent across grade levels both in
school, in the community and at the house. The common behavior
problems are inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity.
• Inattention is the lack of focus when focus on a given event or situation is
required.
• impulsivity (or impulsiveness) is a tendency to act on a whim, displaying
behavior characterized by little or no forethought, reflection, or consideration
of the consequences.
• Hyperactivity is constantly being active in ways that aren’t appropriate for the
time or setting. It’s the constant part that makes the big difference. If it
happened once or twice, nobody would think much of it.

13. 8. In general, social acceptance is low , but some can be
popular.

14. Perceptual, Perceptual-Motor, and General
Coordination Problem
1.) Children with learning disabilities exhibit visual and/or auditory
perceptual disabilities. The problem is not lack of acuity or
sharpness in visual or audition in responding to visual and auditory
perceptual stimulation.
2.) They have difficulty with physical activities that involve gross
and fine motor skills. Thus, they tend to drop things, as though they
are all thumbs or have two left feet.
3.) They have problems with attention and hyperactivity.

15. Memory, Cognitive, and Metacognitive
Problems
• Problems in Memory, Cognitive, and Metacognitive areas
are related. If there is a problem in memory then there
are also problems in understanding or cognition.
Examples:
 Remembering Assignment and
Appointments
Forget the lessons easily
Deficit in Memory (Because the use of
Rehearsal, Categorizing, Mnemonics are
absent).

16. Disorganized thinking

17. • A child with learning disabilities manifest deficits in cognitive functioning that
shows poor academic performance in different areas of learning.
READING LANGUAGE MATHEMATICS

18. Attention, Memory, and
Thinking/Executive Functions of Mind
• Attention Deficit- selective attention or ability to focus on the relevant
details of the lesson in the first requirement for learning to take place.
Children who cannot pay attention cannot focus on the teaching episode
for a particular subject.
• Poor Memory- poor ability to store and receive information or previous
learning is very evident among children learning disabilities. They find
difficulty in remembering mathematic facts, spelling words, vocabulary
meaning, content knowledge and information.

19. Problems in Social Competence
•Problem in relating with other people is not a
characteristic of a persons with learning disabilities
. Rather, it is an outcome of the different social
climates created by people in school, at home, the
community, and other places with whom persons
with learning disabilities interact.

20. Causes of Learning
Disabilities
• The causes of Learning Disabilities are attributed to genetic and
environmental factors. The Genetic factors refer to the characteristics
that are inherited through the genes, chromosomes and DNA.