What Are Signs of Learning Difficulties in Children?

The United States Federal Commission on Learning Disabilities defined learning difficulties in 1988 as: learning difficulties are a variety of heterogeneous disorders that manifest as significant obstacles to the acquisition and use of listening, speaking, writing, reasoning, and mathematical skills. These disorders arise from internal factors of the individual, assuming dysfunction of the central nervous system, and may exist throughout a person's life. Along with learning difficulties, people may have problems with self-regulation, social perception, and social interaction, but these problems do not themselves constitute learning difficulties. Although learning difficulties may be accompanied by other obstacles (such as sensory impairment, mental retardation, severe emotional disorders), or by some external factors (such as cultural differences, inadequate or inappropriate teaching), learning difficulties It is not caused by these obstacles and influencing factors.

Dyslexia

Learning Disabilities is a developmental disorder in learning skills. This type of child is not stupid or stupid (IQ above 70), but from the early stages of development, the normal way of acquiring skills is impaired, which is manifested in a single ability such as reading, computing, or drawing, and other Skills are normal. Therefore, there is often a partial phenomenon in which one grade is good and the other grade is poor.

Dyslexia Definition

According to medical statistics in Europe and the United States, one in six of us is affected by learning difficulties of varying degrees. What are the learning difficulties? The National Institutes of Health (NIH) defines that learning difficulties are attributed to the nervous system, which is characterized by difficulties in recognizing the correctness and fluency of words, and inability to spell, and difficulty in forming the pinyin of the language. What we mean by "learning difficulties" generally refers to specific manifestations of poor learning ability, inattention, poor physical coordination, and lack of social skills due to dyslexia, ADHD, and Asperger's symptoms. .

Causes of Learning Disabilities in Children with Learning Disabilities Syndrome

The cause of learning difficulties is unclear until now, and it is still in the exploratory stage. It is generally considered to be the result of a combination of multiple factors, both internal and external; there are both physical and psychological factors of the individual and environmental factors such as family society; There are both innate and acquired factors; in short, the causes of learning difficulties are multifaceted and are the result of a combination of internal and external factors. So far, there are the following research results or cognitions about the causes of children's learning difficulties.

1. Physiological factors: (1) The child has mild brain damage or mild brain dysfunction due to a certain injury during the fetal period and after birth. (2) Genetic factors. Some learning skills disorders are hereditary, such as seen in children's fathers, grandpas, or other relatives. (3) Physical and mental development lags behind the development level of children of the same age. Detachment of deciduous teeth, slow walking and talking, short stature, etc .; defects in sensory organ function or poor motor coordination. (4) Physical illness. If a child is frail and sick, and often misses class, the homework learned will be discontinuous, and the learning content will not be linked, which will naturally lead to learning difficulties. Some children will have small movements in class, or they may have attention deficits and cannot concentrate. Lead to learning difficulties.

2. Environmental factors: (1) Poor family environment. Due to the long-term work of parents or family members' tensions, children have not been fully cared for by adults since their childhood, especially the lack of maternal love. (2) Children were not well-educated in their infancy, and did not provide rich environmental stimulation and education during the critical period of early childhood growth and development. (3) Inappropriate learning content and education methods make children tired of learning. Some parents are desperate for their children. They pull out seedlings to encourage them, and do not educate according to the physical and mental characteristics of children. They often violate the laws of education in terms of the content, methods, and methods of education. Such as primary school children, elementary school children and so on.

3 Nutrition and metabolism: Recent studies have confirmed that children's learning difficulties are related to nutritional metabolism, lack of certain trace elements or irrational diets, and nutritional imbalances can affect intellectual development. It has been thought that insufficient iodine intake affects children's intelligence, and lithium affects children's personality characteristics, which in turn affects learning. Studies have shown that the content of trace elements zinc and copper in hair of children with learning difficulties is significantly lower than that of normal children, and iron is also an important factor affecting learning performance.

4 Psychological factors: Children's learning difficulties are closely related to psychological factors. It has been recognized in the past. A large number of recent studies have further confirmed that there are general psychological problems in children with learning difficulties. The general observations are that children with learning difficulties have low levels of learning motivation, insufficient learning motivation, poor learning interest, mood swings, will disturbance, cognitive impairment, and low level of self-awareness.

5. Scientific research in recent years shows that learning difficulties are caused by slow development of the brain. If brain functions cannot be effectively performed, it will lead to various types of learning difficulties. Because everyone's brain development is different, the symptoms of learning difficulties will not be completely similar, and the symptoms often overlap each other.

Since the human brain is an important information processing center in the learning process, we can "automate" our capabilities. With the automation function, many things and skills in daily life can be made directly after we learn without thinking. Once the brain is unable to function effectively and automatically, and every time you do something, you have to relearn, it is likely to make reading and writing, coordination of movements, interpersonal relationships, etc .... the life skills that ordinary people can easily learn become troubles, or even become Disasters and nightmares, no matter how hard they struggle, are always stuck in a difficult position.

Effects of Learning Disabilities Syndrome

Generally speaking, the IQ of people with learning difficulties is normal, and sometimes even surpasses ordinary people, but some ordinary people think it is a simple thing, but they still have to make great efforts to achieve it. When it is generally believed that simple things become difficult, they can have profound negative effects on patients. Their self-confidence will be greatly reduced, and frustration will make them lonely or outlier and cause trouble and depression. These will further develop into serious behavior problems, which will affect the development of life's path.

If the child suffers from these problems, parents will be even more distressed. How sad it is when the expectations of Wang Zicheng become disillusioned and the child changes from lively and lovely to lonely and depressed. Therefore, learning difficulties not only cause a serious blow to my personal study and work, but also affect the normal life of their family and friends.

The learning disability syndrome is embodied in the following points

Dyslexia dyslexia

Reading is a learning activity that requires multiple cognitive processes (such as perception, memory understanding, generalization, comparison, reasoning, etc.). As long as children have problems with any of these cognitive abilities, they will affect reading abilities. Dyslexia is therefore common in children with learning difficulties.

1. Reading habits

Tense movements during reading, frowning, lip biting, side reading or head twitching; lost position, unable to find where to start reading; too close to the book when reading; refusing to read with crying or other problematic behavior .

2. Reading aloud

Often omits a word or words in a sentence; arbitrarily insert words in the sentence; replace words in the sentence with other words; reverse the words before and after the phrase; read fluently, in inappropriate There was a pause; the sound was sharp, the breathing was loud, and so on.

3. Recall

First, it is difficult to recall basic facts, and it is impossible to answer questions about basic facts such as time and place in the article; and it is difficult to recall sequences in sequence, and it is impossible to repeat the story in the order of the storyline; at the same time, it is difficult to recall the topics and cannot say the theme of the content read .

4. Understanding skills

Difficult to understand verbatim, unable to correctly say some details and specific information in the reading content; insufficient comprehension skills, unable to draw conclusions from reading materials, unable to compare differences between viewpoints, unable to compare new viewpoints with The views that have been learned are combined; the critical understanding skills are insufficient to combine reading materials with their own lives, to analyze the author's intentions and beliefs, and to compare reading materials with each other.

5. Application aspects of reading strategies

Difficult to draw the key points, the nature of the reading material, the paragraphs, etc.

Dyslexia

The study found that many children with learning difficulties develop insufficiently in their fine motor skills, causing different writing difficulties. Writing difficulties are also called writing defects or visual-motor integration difficulties. The typical writing difficulties of children with learning difficulties are as follows.

1. The method of holding the pen is incorrect

Your finger is too close to the pen tip, or too far away from the pen tip; use only your index finger to carry the pen; the position of the paper is incorrect, and it is often moved or placed too diagonally.

2. Incorrect writing posture

The distance between the body and the tabletop is not appropriate, too far or too close; the distance between the arm and the body is not appropriate, too close to the body or too far away from the body.

3. Improper power control

Using too much force on the pencil will break the pen tip or pierce the paper; the muscles are too tight, the fingers are stiff, and the movement is not flexible; the strength is not enough to hold the pen or the pen path is too shallow.

4. Uneven words

Lack of understanding of the result of a single word, the big one is not big, the small one is not small. For example, the left and right parts of "eating" are written as big as "beggars". .

5. Improper word spacing

The distance between the components of each word is too far. For example, the distance between the left part and the right part of "Ming" is too far, and it becomes "sun and moon"; the distance between the characters is too large or too small.

6. Incorrect stroke order

Do not follow the stroke order rules, such as the word "national", first seal, then write the "jade" inside; divide one stroke into two strokes, or connect several strokes into one stroke.

7. Scribble

The characters have no structure and are crooked and disproportionate. There are no strokes. They are not horizontal, vertical, vertical. They are messy, sometimes they do nt even recognize what is written.

8. Mixed words

Especially when writing pinyin letters or numbers, it is difficult to distinguish between 6 and 9, 5 and 2, b and d, p and q, and so on.

Learning difficulties syndrome math difficulties

Mathematics learning is also an activity that requires the participation of multiple cognitive processes, and in particular needs to have good reasoning, classification, composition, abstraction, generalization and other abilities. In addition, language ability plays a very important role in solving applied problems and learning algebra. Children should have some preparatory skills before learning mathematics, such as the ability to compare, classify, pair, and arrange objects by size, shape, color, and material. Recognize that the total is the sum of parts. Recognize 10 Arabic numbers and understand them. Meaning, assigning all individuals in an object to different objects one by one, can imitate and recall the spatial arrangement of objects, etc.

If children are underdeveloped in these preparation skills, they will be affected when they learn math. Therefore, parents should pay special attention to the development of children's skills in this area, and if there are deficiencies, they must be remedied as soon as possible, so as to avoid negative impact on children's formal math learning.

The difficulties of children with learning difficulties in mathematical learning are mainly manifested in the following aspects.

1. Difficulty reading and writing numbers

It is easy to confuse 5 and 2, 6 and 9 when reading and writing.

2. Counting difficulties

When counting aloud, some numbers are often skipped over; difficulty in understanding ordinal numbers, such as not knowing what day is the second day of the week; unable to count correctly according to certain requirements, such as requiring a red dress for work The girl who asked to count from l to 30 but couldn't count the number containing 4 and multiples of 4 often couldn't complete it correctly.

3 Digital difficulty,

I can't understand the concept of digits. I can't understand that the same number can represent different values on different digits. For example, 4 is in the single digit, 40 is in the tens, and 400 is in the hundreds. Digital difficulties can affect the addition and subtraction of forward and backward positions.

4 Poor calculation skills

The operation method is confusing. For example, during multiplication, the addition operation will appear suddenly; the operation algorithm is not well grasped, and it will not be decremented or carried. The operation steps are omitted.

5. Problem solving defects

Difficulties in solving math lexical problems and practical problems. This is mainly due to a lack of language skills. Other children have difficulty solving problems due to lack of analytical and reasoning skills.

6. Difficulty in organizing space

Reverse or reverse the number, such as 7 1 is read as 17; the position of the number in the calculation process is wrong, such as 54-36 = 22.

Learning Disabilities Syndrome

There are many ways to improve learning difficulties, such as:

1. Special Education Remedial Learning (SEP)

2. Drug treatment

3. Other alternative treatments:

Functional therapy, vision therapy, speech therapy, physical therapy, food therapy, sensory integration therapy, acupuncture, cerebral cortex test, etc.

In the long run, these methods of assistance cannot achieve self-improvement, because most of these therapies focus on the behaviors shown and ignore the causes that cause these phenomena.

The latest research reports in recent years have provided a lot of evidence that the overall appearance and morphology of the brain has rarely changed after birth, but the plasticity of the brain nerve can cause huge changes in the composition level between cells and further affect cognition.

With proper stimulation, the brain can reshape itself to expand the neural pathways and promote links. That is, the brain's neural pathway system can be continuously exercised by applying appropriate sensory stimuli to specific brain control areas by stimulating brain nerves. To make it reach the level of a normal person.

Dyslexia diagnostic criteria

1. Intellectual standards. The lower limit of IQ of standardized intelligence test is 70-75. If the IQ is below 70, it is not a learning difficulty.

2. Poor academic standards. The combination of absolute and poor academic achievement is used to identify children with learning difficulties. The subject assessment is based on the absolute evaluation of outline propositions, and the standard for dividing children with learning difficulties 25 points below the average score is the relative evaluation.

3 The learning process is abnormal. The learning process is a cognitive process in which students perceive information, process information, and use information to solve problems. In the process, children with learning difficulties often show behaviors that deviate from the norm.