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PubMedDate not supplied

The metaphor of scaffolding: its utility for the field of learning disabilities.

Over the past 20 years, an increasing number of psychologists and educators have used the notion of scaffolding as a metaphor for the process by which adults (and more knowledgeable peers) guide children's learning and development. The purpose of the present article is to provide a critical analysis of the scaffolding metaphor, with particular emphasis on its applications to the case of atypical learners. In the initial sections of the article, the origins and early applications of the metaphor are sketched. With this as background, criticisms of the metaphor raised by others are reviewed, and a proposal for an enriched version of the metaphor is presented. At the heart of the proposed revision is an emphasis on the communicational dynamics and conceptual reorganization involved in adult-child interactions. With an enriched metaphor as a frame, the next section reviews applications of the scaffolding metaphor to the study of parent-child interactions and teacher-student instructional activities involving children with learning disabilities. The strengths and limitations of this work are evaluated, and proposals are made for how to reap further benefits from applications of the scaffolding metaphor to analyses of the development and instruction of children with learning disabilities.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Lithium treatment for people with learning disability: patients' and carers' knowledge of hazards and attitudes to treatment.

Twenty-five people with a learning disability who were receiving lithium were assessed with regard to their knowledge of lithium and its adverse effects, and their attitude to treatment. Questionnaires developed for use by people with mental illness were employed, and information was gathered both from people receiving lithium and their carers. Knowledge of the effects of lithium amongst this group was similar to that found in studies of mentally ill people. There was no significant difference in knowledge according to place of residence (with family, in a community residential facility or in hospital). Most people had a positive attitude to lithium treatment; those with more knowledge had more positive attitudes. People with learning disabilities who are prescribed lithium (and their carers) should receive written information about the effect of the drug. The prescriber should check that sufficient knowledge has been acquired to ensure safety.

Adult↗
PubMed1978

Attentional deficits and word attributes preferred by learning disabled children in grades 2, 4, and 6.

This study investigated the postulated effects of attentional deficits on the relative preferences for associative, acoustic, and orthographic attributes in word recognition by 15 learning disabled children each in Grades 2, 4, and 6. An analysis of errors in recall suggests that the children in the second grade did not encode and retrieve information as did their normal counterparts but rather used several stimulus attributes in retrieval. The children in the sixth grade, however, evidenced a significant preference for the orthographic attribute in recall as did normal second grade children. These findings are discussed as they relate to attention deficits, the capacity of short-term memory and achievement in learning disabled children.

Achievement↗
PubMed1995

Learning disabilities, employment discrimination, and the ADA.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 was intended to prohibit discrimination against individuals with disabilities. Although the scope of this legislation is broad, there are aspects of Title I and Title II of the ADA that may be of particular interest to persons with learning disabilities who are preparing for employment. This article discusses those aspects and presents case studies to demonstrate how the ADA could potentially be applied to typical situations. Suggestions are given for individuals with learning disabilities, their parents, and teachers with regard to employment preparation in secondary and postsecondary settings.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1999

Christianization of the soul: religious traditions in the care of people with learning disabilities in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century.

Educational and therapeutic optimism with respect to those with learning disabilities led to new developments in some countries around the mid-nineteenth century. In the Netherlands there was little specialist care and few special initiatives were taken before the end of the century. The dominant expert opinion was that these people required the standard care offered by the asylum. Two mid-nineteenth-century initiatives, however, are worth analysing, since they signal the cautious start of special institutional education in the Netherlands: the Idiotenschool (School for Idiots) in The Hague and the class for idiots at the Meerenberg Asylum. However, the most important alternative to care in the asylum was offered by institutions with explicitly religious motives, which evolved from Catholic charity and Protestant philanthropy for many different types of socially weak and dependent groups. This article will examine the nineteenth-century religious roots of the care of people with learning disabilities in the Netherlands; it will also show how older educational ideas began to reappear in this context by the end of the century.

History, 19th Century↗
PubMed2000

Do learning disability services need epilepsy specialist nurses?

Epilepsy is known to cause higher rates of morbidity and mortality than in the general population. It is estimated that one third of people with a learning disability also have epilepsy, and that their epilepsy is generally more difficult to control. Given these two statements and with the trend to place the majority of people with learning disabilities in small community homes rather than large medical institutions, it follows that there is a need for up-to-date information and education for individuals and carers in a variety of settings to ensure best care and quality of life is achieved. Is there a need for specialist epilepsy nurses to work in this field?

Adult↗
PubMed2001

The use of antiepileptic drugs in learning disabled people with epilepsy: an audit of adult in-patients in a treatment and continuing care service.

The primary aim of the audit described was to examine antiepileptic drug use among adult in-patients with learning disability. A secondary aim was to examine investigation in those patients. For the purposes of this paper "Learning disability" is synonymous with ICD-10 "Mental Retardation", "Mental Handicap" or "Intellectual Impairment" and should not be confused with the North American use of the term which refers to discrete, specific problems in mental abilities such as reading. A total of 75 adult patients on both the Northgate and Prudhoe sites (managed by Northgate and Prudhoe NHS Trust) were identified as being treated with antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) for postulated epilepsy. Only 12 (16%) patients were being treated with three AEDs or more, the remainder being on either one or two AEDs. All patients with a history of status epilepticus were prescribed rectal diazepam or, more rarely, intranasal midazolam. The number and type of investigations performed on patients varied widely and was sometimes limited by the patient's ability to co-operate with procedures. Overall, 28 patients were identified who might benefit from a reduction in the number of AEDs prescribed. In 15 of these patients antiepileptic drug regime was currently being reduced. The increased utilization of sleep/sedated electroencephalogram (EEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI--for partial seizures), where practical, may also increase diagnostic accuracy in identifying epilepsy and its aetiology. Audit will be repeated in 12 months.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Sexuality and people with learning disabilities.

Despite the excellent pioneering work of the Family Planning Association and Brook Advisory Centres, sexuality and people with learning disabilities remains a largely unexplored area (Brandon, 1990). This article highlights the need for such individuals to receive sex education alongside social education. It is proposed that learning disability nurses are the most suitable health-care professionals to be the primary educators on such issues because of their expertise and unique relationships with their clients.

Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice↗
PubMed2003

The meaning of respite care to mothers of children with learning disabilities: two Irish case studies.

There is a growing interest in Ireland in the nature and significance of respite care for carers and those for whom they care. The relationship of individual stress with caring full time for a child who is learning disabled is well documented. Provision of respite care is seen as an important means of alleviating individual carer stress. Yet, the apparent benefits of respite care have been called into question. The present study looks at this issue within the context of respite service provision in Ireland for young people with learning disabilities. A phenomenological approach was used to explore the views of two mothers on respite care and, in particular, its personal significance for them within the context of their caring relationship for their children. The authors found that for these two mothers, whilst some of the predicted benefits of respite care were present, for example improved social activity, their use of respite care and the experience of separation initiated feelings of guilt and appeared to engender a degree of emotional stress. It is argued that providers of respite services in Ireland need to consider how they can support parents who use respite care so that they see its use as a mark of caring for their child and thereby alleviate such feelings of guilt.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed2003

Effects of mothers' autoimmune disease during pregnancy on learning disabilities and hand preference in their children.

OBJECTIVES: To determine whether children (and particularly sons) of women with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) during pregnancy are more likely to have learning disabilities (LD) and be non-right-handed, and if maternal disease variables (ie, presence of maternal antibodies, disease activity level, and use of corticosteroids) predict the prevalence of LD in offspring. DESIGN: Case-controlled study with subjects matched by age and sex. PARTICIPANTS: We studied 58 children whose mothers had SLE during pregnancy and 58 children of healthy mothers. Measures Data collected included maternal disease variables in women with SLE during their pregnancies. All children took a standardized intelligence test (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-III) and completed a modified version of the Edinburgh Hand Preference Questionnaire. They also took standardized tests of reading, arithmetic, and writing achievement. Learning disability was defined as having an academic achievement score of at least 1.5 SDs below the Full-Scale IQ. RESULTS: Sons of women with SLE were significantly more likely to have LD than daughters of women with SLE or children of either sex in the control group. Maternal SLE was not associated with non-right-handedness in sons or daughters. The presence of anti-Ro/La antibodies and disease activity (flare) in mothers during pregnancy were significantly related to higher prevalence of LD in offspring. CONCLUSIONS: Autoimmune disease in women during pregnancy is associated with an increased risk for LD in their sons. Maternal antibodies, particularly anti-Ro/La, likely affect the fetal brain of male offspring and result in later learning problems. These findings should promote greater awareness of the risk for LD in sons of women with autoimmune disease and the possible need for early educational intervention in those children.

Antibodies, Antinuclear↗
PubMed1989

The additive factor method: a differential diagnostic tool in hyperactivity and learning disability.

The Additive Factor Method assumes that task performance is the sum of sequential and independent processes. We studied the duration of the central processes (memory search and decision) and the motor decision process in hyperactive and learning-disabled children under so-called divided attention and S-R compatibility conditions. It was found that the learning-disabled were impaired in memory search and decision processes whereas hyperactives were impaired in the motor decision process.

Attention↗
PubMed1987

What learning-disabled readers fail to retrieve on verbal dichotic tests: a problem of encoding, retrieval, or storage?

Three theoretical models were assessed as a framework for capturing learning-disabled readers' faulty word retrieval. To this end, learning-disabled and skilled readers were compared on verbal dichotic listening tasks for free recall and cued recall of word lists organized by semantic, phonemic, and structural features. The results indicated that disabled readers were comparable on free recall but were inferior to skilled readers on cued recall. No ability group differences were found for categorical and noncategorical recall intrusions during the cued recall phase. Cued recall performance was further analyzed for individual differences in memory trace structure (via the Tulving & Watkins, 1975, reduction method), ear asymmetry, and the allocation of attention to word features prior to cuing. Results indicated that during the cued recall phase, disabled readers' memory traces were inferior in structure to those of skilled readers, even though the two ability groups produced comparable symmetrical recall patterns for the ear presentations. Further, disabled readers had lower selective attention scores for the interhemispheric processing of information prior to cuing than did skilled readers. Taken together, the results suggest that, prior to cued recall, disabled readers suffer from attentional difficulties during interhemispheric processing, which in turn influences the structural formation of their memory trace.

Child↗
PubMed1996

Diagnostic utility of the WISC-III developmental index as a predictor of learning disabilities.

Wechsler's Deterioration Index (WDI) was developed as an indicator of cognitive impairment in adults but has been applied to children, because neuropsychological deficits have often been hypothesized to account for learning difficulties during the development period. Renamed the Wechsler Developmental Index, this measure has been used to discriminate among groups of children with and without learning disabilities. The present study replicated those findings with the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition, but also applied more appropriate diagnostic efficiency statistics to analyze the actual diagnostic utility of the WDI. These analyses revealed that the WDI performed at chance levels when distinguishing 611 students diagnosed with learning disabilities from those diagnosed with emotional disabled (n = 80) or mental retardation (n = 33), as well as from 2,200 simulated random nondisabled cases. It was concluded that mean group differences were not adequate and that ipsative indicators must be definitively validated in experimental environments before they can be applied in practice.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Language disorders and learning disabilities in school-refusing adolescents.

OBJECTIVE: We undertook this study to test the hypothesis that school-refusing adolescents hospitalized on an inpatient psychiatric unit have more language and learning disabilities than diagnosis-, age-, and sex-matched psychiatric controls. METHOD: The Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement-Revised (WJTA-R), the WISC-R, the Adolescent Language Screening Test, the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Revised, and the Test of Language Competence (TLC) were given to a group of well-characterized, primarily depressed school refusers and matched psychiatric controls. RESULTS: We found that school-refusing adolescents had significantly lower WISC-R verbal intelligence scores, lower Math and Written Language subscale scores on the WJTA-R, and lower scores on the TLC than nonrefusers. School refusers were found to have a significantly higher incidence of both language impairments and learning disabilities than controls. CONCLUSIONS: We infer that academic and communicative frustration and the adolescent's resulting inability to meet the academic and social demands in the school environment may play a role in the etiology of school refusal.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1981

Relationship between development of the body-righting reaction and manual midline crossing behavior in the learning disabled.

The study was designed to consider the possible relationship between the development and integration of the body-righting reaction and the development of manual midline crossing behavior in learning-disabled and normal children aged 6 to 8 years (23 subjects in each group). A combination of three movement patterns (rolling from supine to prone, transition from supine to standing, and equilibrium in sitting) was used to analyze the body-righting reaction. The Space Visualization Contralateral Use (SVCU) score derived from the Southern California Space Visualization Test was used to measure manual midline crossing behavior. Results of the study found that the learning-disabled subjects exhibited significantly reduced performance on both test measures, when compared to the normal controls. A correlation between scores on the two tests did not reach significance. The findings are described as they relate to sensory integration testing, and the need for further study of the body-righting reaction and manual midline crossing behavior.

Child↗
PubMed2005

Attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and learning disabilities (LD): adolescents perspective.

Three hundred and eight pupils in the age group 12-18 years were interviewed and examined. They had been diagnosed as having attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and learning disabilities (LD), and were attending a high school devoted to special education. Their classification into subgroups was as follows: ADHD - inattentive (I) = 22.1%, ADHD - hyperactivity/impulsivity (HI) = 12.3% and combined = 42.2%. Only 25% of them were treated by methylphenidate (Ritalin). Ninety-four percent of them were diagnosed with comorbidity of 'learning disabilities'. Thirty-four percent of them reported being severely stressed when going to school and sitting in class. Their complaints were: tiredness and excessive needs to sleep, frequent quarrelling with close friends, feeling different from other classmates and having low self-esteem (SE). They complaint that their parents don't understand them. Things that irritated them the most were being lied to and coercion by others. The authors suggest to consider ADHD/LD as neurobehavioral disability. It is mandatory to prepare them for adult life with proper social skills and a suitable occupation.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1980

[Psychodiagnostics of learning disabilities (author's transl)].

Various procedures for psychodiagnosis of mentally disabled persons are critically described. Diagnostics and therapy are conceived as a process that should not be fragmented. Advantages and disadvantages of a rigidly structured diagnostic approach are discussed. The various possibilities for psychological examination of the learning disabled are accepted as a meaningful foundation for subsequent stimulation and therapy only if they include cooperation of the parents and the therapeutic or functional personnel. Anamnesis as well as observation and analysis of behaviour are emphasised as especially needed diagnostic tools. This is illustrated by means of the diagnosis of aggressive behavioural disorders in learning disabled included in a therapy group. The main emphasis in psychological management of the mentally disabled is placed on behavioural therapy. The author posits departure from its more orthodox methods, and suggests orientation towards Lazarus' model. The necessity for the therapist to be committed with his whole personality is regarded as fundamental to a community for diagnosis and therapy.

Behavior Therapy↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Sources of information used in diagnosing childhood learning disabilities.

One hundred nineteen questionnaires in which board certified/eligible child neurologists were asked to rank the diagnostic importance of 8 sources of information commonly used in the assessment of children with learning disabilities were analyzed by the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed ranks test. All pairwise comparisons of the 8 sources revealed significant differences (P less than or equal to .033) except for psychologic reports (mean rank +/- 1 S.D. = 2.09 +/- 1.14) and medical histories (2.26 +/- 1.45) which were rated equal (P = .397) and, compared to the other sources, diagnostically most useful (P less than .0001). Analysis of the 6 remaining sources demonstrated the following: teachers' reports (3.39 +/- 1.35) were deemed more helpful than the mental status examination (3.92 +/- 1.61; P = .033) and questionnaires distributed to parents and teachers (5.05 +/- 2.11) were more useful than findings on the remainder of the neurologic examination (5.81 +/- 1.46; P = .012). Social service reports (6.45 +/- 1.32) took precedence over soft signs (7.12 +/- 1.05; P = .001) which were considered the least diagnostically helpful. Analysis of variance revealed that this rank order was relatively independent of the responders' age, type of practice, years elapsed since completion of training and percentage of professional time spent examining pediatric patients. Information derived from outside sources (collective mean rank +/- 1 S.D. = 4.25 +/- 0.9) contributed significantly more to the diagnosis of learning disabilities than to information elicited directly by the examining neurologists (4.77 +/- .88; P = .002).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Adult↗