educational info

Educational Information

Teaching Adults with Learning Disabilities
ERIC Digest No. 99
Lowry, Cheryl Meredith, 1990

Text:

Adult educators concur that youngsters with learning disabilities (LD) do not simply outgrow them. They become adults with LD, and many of them participate in adult education programs. This ERIC DIGEST discusses the number of adult learners with LD, identifies relevant issues, describes intervention strategies, and suggests specific techniques that adult educators can use with their LD students.

INCIDENCE

The number of adults with LD in adult education is not easy to estimate because extrapolating from the number of school children receiving LD services (4.84 percent in 1987-88) may result in a fair estimate of learning disabled adults in the population but not of those in adult education. Adults with LD may comprise as many as 80 percent of the students in adult basic education programs (Ross 1987), but a smaller percentage of students in other adult education settings, such as corporate training programs and continuing education, are estimated to have LD (Ross-Gordon 1989).

Teachers may observe the following characteristics in adult learners who have LD (HEATH Resource Center 1989):

1. Pronounced difficulty with reading, writing, spelling, and number concepts, although other skills are average to superior
2. Poorly formed handwriting that may be printing instead of script and that may have uneven spacing between words
3. Difficulty in listening to a lecture and taking notes at the same time
4. Severe difficulty in sticking to simple schedules, repeatedly forgetting things and losing things
5. Confusion about up and down and right and left
6. Excessive anxiety, anger, or depression because of frustration when coping with social situations
7. Misinterpretation of the subtleties in language, tone of voice, or social situations Nonetheless, Ross-Gordon (1989) points out that many adults with LD exhibit strengths that enable them to compensate for their disabilities and to perform successfully even without supportive services.

ISSUES

Among the most serious issues concerning adults with LD are the lack of an agreed-upon definition of LD and the scarcity of competent assessment tools to identify adults who have them.

DEFINITION

Since the term learning disability was first used in 1963 (Ross 1987), most definitions of LD have been developed to describe children in academic contexts, rather than to describe adults in a variety of work and personal life settings. That is true even of the definition of learning disability most often cited, which was accepted for the Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (Ross-Gordon 1989). A definition that does stress the lifelong impact of LD and its potential effects on multiple aspects of a person's life was approved by the Association for Children and Adults with LD in 1986. It defines specific LD as a chronic condition of presumed neurological origin, which selectively interferes with the development, integration, and/or demonstration of verbal and nonverbal abilities. Specific LD, the definition says, exists as a distinct handicapping condition and varies in its manifestations and in degrees of severity. The definition states that the condition can affect self-esteem, education, vocation, socialization, and daily living activities ("ACLD Description" 1986).

As that definition reflects, the theories of LD that have prevailed assume that individuals with LD have difficulty learning because of some difference in information processing (Ross-Gordon 1989). That difference is assumed to have a neurological basis. Recent brain research has substantiated the neuropsychological theory of LD, even though the neurological basis of individual LDs cannot be verified by current assessment procedures (ibid.).

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