Journal of Learning Disabilities

In general, the learning disabled youngster in the middle school experiences the same developmental stresses that his more untroubled peers experience, but many times his reactions to these stresses are more severe and intense. Previous years of defeat in classroom learning have a cumulative effect, and self-concept may have suffered as a result of not being effectively attended to in the school environment. Therefore, adolescents with learning difficulties often need strong adult support if they are to perceive the school setting as a personalized and meaningful place for learning. The resource room is one vehicle that may provide such assistance.

The REE approach aims at aiding children to become better problem solvers. A structured program of activities furthers this end. Typically, this involves three phases. Phase One, the planning phase, consists of targeting problem areas, planning formal lessons, and deciding how to integrate the concepts with the regular curriculum. Phase Two, the implementation phase, involves presenting the formal lessons and the integrated curriculum activities, and employing appropriate intervention strategies as problems arise. Phase Three, the feedback phase, overlaps with the others and involves lesson modifications. For example, the teacher can shorten lessons to accommodate certain children's unusually short attention spans, or make them more abstract for a group of children originally thought able to handle only the most concrete and experientially presented concepts. These integral program changes, based upon observational feedback, reflect the philosophy of the REE system which seeks to promote experimentation and the refinement of skills for effective problem solving. — 420 East 79th St., New York, N. Y. 10021.

The author, searching for possible neurological anomalies behind a learning disability, came upon the theory that faulty lateralization is implicated in reading difficulties. This paper is an account of her efforts to induce pupils to use primarily the left hemisphere in learning to read, and of some of the results.

A review of recent research on the development of memory, attention, perception, and learning provides support for a new interpretation of the learning disabled child's failure to perform normally in a variety of task settings. Learning failure in these children has often been attributed to the existence of discrete and specific disabilities in a variety of psychological processes necessary for learning. In the context of research from developmental psychology, however, the poor performance of learning disabled children on many tasks suggests that they may not have developed the cognitive and emotional characteristics necessary to adapt to the requirements of a task and to use active and efficient task strategies. This view has important implications for both research and treatment.

Two tests of morphological ability, the Berry-Talbott Test (Berry & Talbott. 1966) and the Grammatic Closure Test of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (Kirk, McCarthy, & Kirk 1968), were administered to 20 good readers and 20 dyslexics. The results indicated that the dyslexics were inferior to the good readers on both measures, and that on the Berry-Talbott Test, the complex items accounted for most of the difference between the sample groups. These two measures might be useful in identifying children experiencing difficulty in generating and mastering morphological rules. In addition, an item analysis may provide valuable information for the language therapist. Teachers of reading should also be alert to the possibility that poor readers may be deficient in morphological ability which, in turn, may result in an inefficient use of semantic and syntactic clues provided in the morphology of written language. Through oral language instruction, such children may be helped to internalize complex morphological structures.

The present study is an investigation of the predictive validity and test-retest reliability of a new readiness instrument, the Basic School Skills Inventory (BSSI). Scores obtained by 90 children in kindergarten on the BSSI were used to predict later teacher ratings of their performance in first grade. Test-retest reliability was estimated using a method developed for criterion-referenced measures, and sex and ethnic differences in test scores were examined. It was concluded that the BSSI total score provided an effective and highly reliable means of predicting teachers' ratings of first-grade performance.

The concept of learning disabilities in childhood and youth is based on a confusion of ideas and understandings, and for the newcomer to the problem, it is often difficult to identify myths and unfounded concepts from the realities. The author has attempted to identify a number of misconceptions and to counterbalance these with statements based on historical, research, or theoretical facts. He deals with such matters as the issue of definition of the field, focus of child population included in the concept of learning disability, personnel preparation, and integration of these children into regular grades.