What Is a Learning Disability?

When someone has a Learning Disability, it means that he or she learns differently than most people, and that learning itself is usually more difficult than it is for most people. A Learning Disability is a condition that can affect anybody, regardless of age, ethnicity, or gender. It is diagnosed using four criteria:

• First, there must be a significant discrepancy between overall cognitive ability and achievement. Ability is usually estimated using a battery of intelligence tests. Achievement means performance in some academic area, such as reading, spelling, or math.
• The second criterion for a Learning Disability is a processing deficit. The brain must process all information that it receives from the senses (like hearing and vision). Sometimes, a person's ability to process information is impaired in some way. For example, a person's visual memory may be weak. This person has great difficulty remembering what he sees. Another person may have trouble processing the sounds she hears. She may have trouble discriminating between sounds that are similar, like 'f' and 's'.
• Third, the processing deficit(s) must be shown to be directly contributing to underachievement. For example, it is not enough to say that a person has "visual-motor problems"; the visual-motor weaknesses must be negatively impacting academic performance, say in handwriting quality. Likewise, the person who has difficulty processing and discriminating between sounds may have trouble learning to read using a phonics approach.
• The fourth criteria for diagnosing a Learning Disability is that the underachievement cannot be primarily due to factors other than a processing deficit, such as a head injury or epilepsy, physical disability, sensory impairment (vision and hearing), mental retardation, lack of appropriate instruction, or severe psychological disturbance. Of course, many people with learning disabilities have other problems in addition to their learning disability, such as low self esteem and test-anxiety. However, these other concerns are not the primary cause of the underachievement; they are secondary to the learning disability.