History of Learning Difficulties

Educators have been perplexed for generations by the inability of some students to succeed in, or even comprehend, assigned classroom studies. Some students do well in academic studies, while others must struggle to achieve even mediocre success.

Some students find schoolwork assignments easy to complete, while others find the experience to be a nightmare. Some students are successful in elementary and secondary educational levels and proceed on to higher degrees of education; others become frustrated with a public school system that constantly fails them and drop out at the earliest possible moment, simply to end the painful experience.Although many explanations can be offered to explain why some students do not perform satisfactorily, an underlying learning disability (LD) is often the culprit. The most common forms of LD are dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and short term memory dysfunction. History of LD: Although the United States federal government became involved in LD through task forces, legislation, and funding during the 1960s and 1970s LD is not a new concept.

It can be traced back to the early l800s.The earliest believed recognized case of LD occurred in 1802 when Franz Joseph Gall-a German-French anatomist and physiologist and Napoleon’s surgeon-recognized an association between brain injury in soldiers and subsequent expressive language disorders. In 1822, Gall published a book entitled Sur les Fonctions, in which he outlined his belief the brain was divided into twenty-seven separate "organs," each corresponding to a discrete human faculty. He believed one of those separate organs controlled the memory of things; the memory of facts; educability; perfectibility.Therefore, any imperfection in those processes must be due to a cranial fault.

In 1877, Adolph Kassmaul-a German physician-coined the phrase word blindness for loss of ability to read. The phrase, which is still used today to describe a form of dyslexia known as alexia, refers to a neurological disorder characterized by loss of the ability to read or understand the written word, either totally or partially. Partial word blindness permits the individual to recognize letters, but read only certain types of words. John Hinshelwood-an ophthalmologist-and W.

Pringle Morgan-a general practitioner-who took Kassmaul’s work on LD further into scientific research. In 1896, Hinshelwood noted the difference between alexia-complete word blindness-and dyslexia, which is a partial impairment. They both speculated that difficulties with reading and writing were due to congenital word blindness. Nevertheless, the dominant view for several years to come stressed the difficulties were caused by visual processing deficiencies.

There remains continuing interest in the role of visual factors in the etiology of dyslexia, especially in the low level of impairments of the visual system.Later research would discount that connection and adopt the view that dyslexia is a verbal deficit. In 1920s American psychologists and researchers began to notice work done by their European counterparts who had been focusing on brain-behavior relationships, as well as learning disabilities exhibited by both children and adults. As a result, the Americans began to zero in on language and reading disabilities, placing importance on perceptual, perceptual-motor, and attention disabilities. The phenomenon of learning disabilities, then called the invisible handicap, was first noted by Dr.

Kurt Goldstein in the late 1920s. Samuel Orton, Grace Fernald, Marion Monroe, and Samuel Kirk were just four researchers during that era that made substantial headway on understanding some of the more common forms of LD. Samuel Orton teamed with his wife, June Orton, to study the field of language disabilities. Together they conducted research, trained educators and therapists, and treated individuals with reading and writing difficulties.

Educational historians state they were two of the most important individuals in the history of dyslexia.Orton attended Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Harvard University. Along with Anna Gillingham, he studied pathology at Boston City Hospital in 1905-1906. He initiated a successful remedial reading training system program based on visual-auditory-kinesthetic linkages.

In 1925, he published a paper detailing his version of word blindness. Because earning a degree did not guarantee a career in academic psychology for women, many opted for therapeutic and other nonacademic positions.Therefore, Grace Fernald joined William Healy's Juvenile Psychopathic Institution in Chicago in 1909. She developed her own kinesthetic method of teaching spelling and reading. She used her finger to trace in the air words that gave her students difficulty; thus incorporating visual aid into the learning process.

She became famous for her teaching methods and students having difficulties were frequently referred to her by academic diagnosticians. She maintained extensive records on the progress of her students, and in 1921 published a paper on her style of kinesthetic method’s effects on word recognition .Marion Monroe was a former research assistant of Orten, prior to moving to Chicago where she worked at the Institute for Juvenile Research. In her work she stressed the phonetic approach to reading and the importance of providing students exhibiting reading difficulties with intensive instruction.

Utilizing the experimental research method, she analyzed groups and students and instituted new educational techniques. She also introduced the discrepancy concept as a way of identifying students with reading disabilities.Samuel Kirk worked with Monroe at the University of Chicago, where he earned his master’s degree, and was very much influenced by her work in phonics. During this time he became acquainted with a young boy, labeled by the establishment as word blind. After working with the lad for some time he developed and refined an assessment approach for pinpointing specific learning disabilities in children.

He was directly responsible for the creation of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA) which assesses specific psycholinguistic abilities and disabilities in young children.This test also facilitates an assessment of a child’s abilities or purposes of remediation, and evaluates his/her cognitive and perceptual abilities in communication. During this same time frame, several European researchers immigrated to the United States to continue their work because of political unrest in their homelands. They conducted research into the perceptual, perceptual-motor, and attention disabilities of adults with brain injuries . Kurt Goldstein,Alfred Strauss, Laura Lehtinen, and Newell Kephart were just a few of the immigrants playing major roles in those areas of study.

Strauss, Lehtinen, and Kephart worked closely together; ultimately they recommended a distraction-free environment, thus placing a heavy emphasis on the remediation of perceptional disturbances which they believed would aid students with LD. Kurt Goldstein, native of what is now Poland, was educated at Breslau and Heidelberg; he became interested in aphasia when he studied under Carl Wernicke. He collaborated with Adhemar Gelb on visual agnosia-which they called mind blindness. The papers the two submitted for publication attributed mind blindness to problems with Gestalt formation of visual images.

After writing his famous book, The Organism, in 1933, he immigrated to American because of anti-Semitism. Goldstein had a holistic theory of the human organism, one that challenged reductivist concepts and approaches that deal with localized symptoms. He greatly influenced many researchers in the field of Gestalt psychology . Strauss, along with Lehtinen and Kephart created the diagnostic category of minimal brain damage in children. He presumed that children with LD, who were not mentally retarded, hearing impaired, or emotionally disturbed, had minimal brain damage .

In 1943, he published his research conclusions which were entitled Diagnosis and education of the cripple-brained, deficient child in the Journal of Exceptional Children. His identification of behaviors, exhibited by minimally brain damaged children, became known as the Strauss Syndrome. In 1949, he founded the Cove School in Racine, Wisconsin which was established as a residential school for brain injured children. He remained the school’s president until his death in 1957. Laura Lehtinen, a teacher originally from Germany, worked with Strauss at the Wayne County School at Northville Michigan during the mid 1940s.

They believed that a student’s academic learning skills would be improved if their perceptual skills could be developed. In 1947, they published Psychopathology and education of the brain-injured child wherein they recommended specific instructional approaches related to perception. Lehtinen believed factors such as bulletin board displays and teacher jewelry were distractions that interfered with the children’s ability to think and learn. She also recommended avoiding references to the letters b and d, because a contiguous use of those letters was confusing to the student .Kephart worked with Strauss at the Cove School during the late l940s and l950s. At this time, they expanded the study of brain injury to include children of normal intelligence.

They argued that perceptual-motor, cognitive and behavior problems found among children with mental deficiencies were also found in children with normal intelligence. Thus, they concluded that children of normal intelligence exhibiting those problems were also brain damaged; this led them off track because of an error in deductive reasoning, and that error would influence their work for some time.They were greatly criticized for their deductions, because there was no scientific evidence that brain damage existed, and their reasoning was based only on the children’s behavior. Nonetheless, their path of study was followed by many others. Kephart continued research into stages of perceptual development that evolved into a perceptual-motor development theory named after him. He believed that development of motor behaviors arose from a hierarchy of motor achievements.

The central idea of the theory concluded that motoric responses to a child’s environment are the central core to all behavior.He was one of the first researchers to incorporate neurological networks into his theory of development, and he concluded that discovery by a child of how certain movements can affect their environment; such as eye-hand coordination, substantiated his theory. Because he believed all perceptual development rises from a hierarchy of motor skills, he deduced that learning disabilities must arise from a general slowdown of achievement in motor development and cause a breakdown of that achievement at some point . Conclusion: .

In spite of the inability of researchers to prove LD was caused by neurological dysfunction, middle-class parents during this period welcomed the explanation of why their child was experiencing such difficulty in school. Prior to the l960s, those children were frequently described as dumb-even though they were smart in other ways; they often tried very hard and the parents believed they would learn, if only they could. Many changes took place between 1960 and 1975; not only in research that changed the scientific views of LD, but the general public’s awareness of LD improved dramatically.The federal government even became involved and established resources and guidelines to assist the public school systems in dealing with LD issues.

It was during this time period that the term learning disabilities was first introduced, the federal government included learning disabilities on its agenda, parents and professionals founded organizations for learning disabilities, and educational programming for students with learning disabilities blossomed-with a particular focus on psychological processing and perceptual training .