Handbook of Cognitive, Social, and Neuropsychological Aspects of Learning Disabilities

Volume I

Stephen J. Ceci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136560675
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Recognized as the definitive reference in the field, this book addresses a broad range of biologically based disorders that affect children's learning and development. Leading authorities review the genetics of each disorder; its course and outcome; associated developmental, cognitive, and psychosocial challenges; and what clinicians and educators need to know about effective approaches to assessment and intervention. Coverage encompasses numerous lower-incidence neurodevelopmental disabilities as well as more frequently diagnosed learning and behavior problems with a genetic component.

I DEFINITIONAL CONTROVERSY

1	Learning Disabilities

John Doris

Cornell University

In the Education of the Handicapped Act, federal legislation of 1970 states that:

The term “children with specific learning disabilities” means those children who have a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, which disorder may manifest itself in imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or do mathematical calculations. Such disorders include such conditions as perceptual handicaps, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia. Such term does not include children who have learning problems which are primarily the result of visual, hearing, or motor handicaps, of mental retardation, of emotional disturbance, or of environmental disadvantage. (Pub. L. No. 91–230, 84 Stat. p. 175, 177)

This legislation—with its categorical definition of learning disabilities and its authorization of programs of research, training, and model centers—provides a convenient take-off point for a consideration of a large group of educationally handicapped children who over the years have been characterized by a protean set of labels, numbers, symptoms, etiologies, and treatments. It was, of course, part of a federal legislative program that addressed the needs of broader classifications of children and, like the subsequent Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, which further impacted programs for the learning disabled, can be seen as the result of various social and historical forces that during these past few decades have reshaped the way our society and our schools perceive and react to the educationally handicapped child. Concerning themselves primarily with mental retardation, Sarason and Doris (1979) and Doris (1982) have attempted to show how parent groups, professionals, and civil rights advocates reacting to the ferment in the larger society were instrumental in bringing about this change through legislation, court challenges, and progress in professional theory and practice. Movements for nonexclusionary schooling, mainstreaming, and deinstitutionalization were all part of the interlocking mix of transformation.

Within that mix the growth of the field of learning disabilities was not the least remarkable development. In 1968/69, just prior to the first appearance of the federal definition of learning disabilities—with its specific designation of such handicaps in a category eligible for federal aid—120,000 children were enrolled in special education services under this categorical label (Martin, 1970). In 1976/77, the first year a child count was made under the Education for all Handicapped Children Act, 797,213 learning-disabled children received special education services. By 1981/82 the number had reached 1,627,344—accounting for 4% of the school-age enrollment and 38% of all children receiving special education services (U.S. Dept. Education, 1983, pp. 2–4, 72). The speech-impaired and the mentally retarded, who had long headed the categorical list of handicapped in terms of numbers of children served, had fallen to second and third ranks respectively.

Despite this phenomenal growth of the field, even a cursory survey of the literature of the 70s and early 80s indicates that whatever degree of professional consensus supported the 1970 federal definition of learning disabilities, it was almost immediately subject to dissolution. The leading journals of the field contain continual revisions of definition and questioning of the distinction of learning disabilities from other categories of educational handicap.

There are, of course, notable authorities, such as Cruickshank, who over decades have consistently stuck fast to their particular definitions of learning disability and so can stoutly claim that discrepant research findings and the failure of educational practice are not the result of the protean nature of learning disabilities but rather the failure on the part of researchers and educators to adhere to a proper definition of the disorder with its appropriate techniques for diagnosis and remediation (Cruickshank, 1977b). Other authorities under the pressure of research findings or administrative necessity find themselves modifying their original conceptualizations of the disability and its remedy. Still others would appear to challenge the very utility of the concept.

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES AND ORGANIZATION OF THE SCHOOL

At such a time in the development of a professional field it is perhaps not inappropriate to glance briefly back over the development of that field without being constrained by a legal or professional definition of the subject matter.

In so doing, we may suspect that the range and pattern of individual differences in the learning ability of children have not undergone significant change since before the last retreat of the polar ice cap. But we must grant that the way in which a parent or a society construes and reacts to a child’s failure to learn is subject to continual change. Thus, it is not of note to learn from Philostratus (1922, p. 165), that the son of Herodes, the Sophist, could never remember the names of the alphabet. But that the frustrated father reacted by conceiving the idea of providing 24 slaves to be brought up with his son and of naming each after one of the letters of the Greek alphabet gives pause for reflection. A theory of learning and a model of instruction are there implied that are not without the impress of classical culture. But Aristotle’s theory of association and the unique resources of slavocracy aside, it appears that Herodes assumed that his son must learn to read as all other Greek and Roman children learned to read: first by learning the names of the letters, then syllables, then words, and finally sentences (Quintillian, in Wheelock, 1974, pp. 35–38). There was apparently no thought of adjustment to individual differences. Indeed, down to the beginning of the 20th century there does not appear to be any real or sustained concern upon the part of general education with the individual differences with which children respond to the learning task. In fact, until the 19th century there does not even appear to be much concern about the adequacy of the ancient Greek approach to the teaching of reading. So we find the “Ole Blue-Back” speller of Webster (1962)—which sold millions of copies in the first half of the 19th century (Johnson, 1925)—introducing the child to reading in a way that would not have seemed the least strange to Quintillian.

Mathews (1966), in his excellent historical account of the methods used for teaching reading, notes that, although there was much experimentation in 16th- and 17-century England with various devices and techniques to make the learning of letters an easier task for children, “teachers did not swerve from the ancient classical method of having the child start with a mastery of the letters, then of syllables, and finally of words and sentences” (p. 27). Nevertheless, beginning in the 16th century, a number of continental pedagogues began to introduce radically new methods for the teaching of reading that in time achieved some currency. These innovations, through the efforts of Horace Mann and other schoolmen, were to influence American education in the 19th century and so ignite our own endless controversy of “the one best way” to teach reading. What is of note in these methods, whether they were of the synthetic or analytic, the phonic or “looksay” variety, or whatever, is that their focus was on the best method for all children.

That individual differences were ignored is not strange. With the spread of mass education, beginning in the 16th century, the central problem was efficiency in instruction. Comenius, De La Salle, and Lancaster all concerned themselves with issues of group or simultaneous instruction. Working with the children of the poor in the late 17th century, De La Salle would revolutionize the schooling of Europe with instructional grades, wall charts, and group recitations. The first grade learned the alphabet, the second proceeded to syllables, the third worked from a primer of syllables and words, the fourth used a book of connected discourse, and the higher grades were devoted to arithmetic, Latin, and the mastery of writing (De La Salle, 1935). In the graded groups of Lancaster’s monitorial system, the first group imitated the monitor by tracing the alphabet on sand tables and then on to syllables and words and from sand tables to wall charts and slates. It was again a system for mass-educating the children of the poorer classes of society (Lancaster, 1806).

The efficiency of these group methods of instruction is vividly attested by the personal accounts of those who were taught by the contrasting individual method in the schools of our early national period. There, children were called up one or two at a time for recitation. The teacher opening a book pointed to letters from the text with a pin or a knife point, and a child called them out while the rest of the class remained bored and restive in their seats. (Goodrich, 1859, pp. 33–38; Oliver, 1876; Wright, 1849, pp. 46–48). So too, were reading, spelling, and arithmetic recitations conducted for the older children—with resultant gross waste of instructional time (Barnard, 1965; Oliver, 1876).

Much of the reforming effort of the American schoolmen of the early and middle 19th century—shaped in large part by the developments in Europe—was devoted to increased efficiency of instruction. A growing mercantile and industrial economy demanded an educated citizenry, and by the end of the century America had developed a relatively efficient instrument for mass education, the lock-step, graded school system.

Children were to enter in their fifth or sixth year, to receive simultaneous instruction, to utilize uniform texts, and to move along with their peers with annual or semiannual promotions from one grade to the next until, at the end of 8 years, they were finished scholars capable of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and possessed of a smattering of history, geography, and other substantive knowledge necessary to their functioning as good citizens of the Republic. This system, with its disregard for the individuality of the learner, worked reasonably well. Those with the competence and the motivation to stay the course were by the standards of the time adequately trained. Those who had neither the competence nor the motivation either withdrew or were forced out.

But with the advent of effective compulsory education laws toward the latter part of the 19th century, the scene changed. Compulsory education laws were in themselves the result of larger social forces, such as the combined efforts of philanthropy and organized labor in opposition to child labor (Ensign, 1921) and such as society’s attempt to preserve and foster its American values in face of the onslaught of rapid industrial change, urbanization, mass immigration, and the social upheavals originating in and following the civil war (Burgess, 1976; Tyack, 1976). The effect of the enforcement of these compulsory education laws upon the lock-step graded public school system was to quickly choke its smooth operation with school laggards—those who could not or would not keep pace with their peers. Early statistics are hard to obtain but by 1911 the numbers of pupils retarded in their school progress in the city schools was estimated in excess of 33% (Ayres, 1909; Immigration Commission, 1911).

ADJUSTMENTS OF GRADED SCHOOL TO SCHOOL LAGGARDS

The schools had to adjust and they did so in two ways, by attempted reorganization of the graded system with its instructional methods and by the development of special classes. Change had begun to appear in the larger cities even before the graded system had been fully perfected and disseminated. By 1870 William Torrey Harrison, then superintendent of schools in St. Louis, was advocating and implementing classes of variable length, from 6 to 20 weeks, with frequent reclassification of pupils, permitting rapid or slower progress through the curriculum in accordance with the child’s capability (Holmes, 1911). More thorough-going reform appeared in the form of tracking systems with the Cambridge plan being introduced in 1892. Providing a slow and fast track with opportunity for switching back and forth, it allowed the program of studies to be completed in a variable number of years (Cogswell, 1900). Other plans for tracking such as that of North Denver provided not so much for different rates of progress as for a differentiated curriculum with varying degrees of enrichment over and above the basic course of studies (Van Sickle, 1900).

Tracking systems attempted to provide for individual differences by a reorganization of the school, not by abandoning the class or simultaneous instruction that the schoolmen had fought so hard to develop in the 19th century. But other educators of the period were more radical—or perhaps reactionary—in their approach to the problem, and experimentation in individual instruction began to appear almost simultaneously with tracking. Search’s 1894 description of the Pueblo Plan describes it as both graded and ungraded: “graded insofar as it applies to the plan of work, but ungraded in its accommodation to the individual” (p. 155). Class recitation was abolished in favor of individual instruction. While the teacher worked with one pupil, the others continued independently with assigned work. This was supplemented by occasional group exercises, but the basic concern was with the pupil’s progress as an individual. Holmes (1911) describes the extension of Search’s ideals in the schools of Newtown, Massachusetts, where the attention to individual needs was provided by “unassigned teachers.” The unassigned teacher worked with individuals or with small groups of children sent to her by the regular classroom teacher for special help or with students progressing so rapidly that their regular class work needed supplementation. At times the unassigned teacher might work with an individual child in order to determine if he should be assigned to a “special class for backward children,” or whether with sufficient individual attention he might be reassigned to a regular class. It is also of note that in this Newtown plan, promotion was conceived as continuous progress and occurred by subjects rather than grades.

In Batavia, New York, Superintendent John Kennedy (1914) conceived of teaching as a dual process consisting of group instruction with all the attendant values of social interaction and individual instruction as a necessary supplement and corrective of class teaching. In large classes he introduced the coordinate teacher plan. This coordinate teacher worked in the same room with the regular teacher but individually with those pupils lagging behind in their studies in order to bring them up to grade. The success of this experiment convinced him that the two processes of group and individual instruction must be used in all classes. In small classes, he insisted, it was possible for the single teacher to assume both roles, alternating periods of group instruction with those of individual instruction. Although Holmes in his 1911 review of grading plans was particularly enthusiastic about the Batavia plan in either its one-teacher or two-teacher forms, Jones (1911) with perhaps more realism pointed out the difficulty of giving indiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Part I: Definitional Controversy
• Part II: Microlevel Cognitive Aspects of Learning Disabllitles
• Part III: Macrolevel Cognitive Aspects of Learning Disabilities
• Part IV: Psychosocial Aspects of Learning Disabilities
• Part V: Neuropsychological Aspects of Learning Disabilities
• Author lndex
• Subject lndex