Learning Disabilities

This study aimed to investigate the experiences of people with intellectual disability (ID) using information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the ways these technologies foster social connectedness. In partnership with a community mental health organization, this qualitative descriptive study explored the experiences of 10 people with ID using ICTs. Participants described how ICTs Opened the Door to Possibilities in their life - ICTs provided an avenue for connecting with other people, a means to pursue personal interests and a tool for organizing everyday life. Opening the door to possibilities was further understood as movement towards digital inclusion for people with ID, conceptualized as the fit between social opportunity and personal skills. We have identified the prominent role social supports play in creating (and constraining) opportunities for digital inclusion, and that digital inclusion has the potential to enable social connectedness and the development of agency. Consideration of the complex interaction between social opportunity and personal skills, and the mediating influence of supports, will enhance the inclusion of people with ID.

Dyslexia is a specific learning disability characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling abilities. The absence of other high level cognitive deficits in the dyslexic population has led some authors to propose that non-strategical processes like implicit learning could be impaired in this population. Most studies have addressed this issue by using sequence learning tasks, but so far the results have not been conclusive. We test this hypothesis by comparing the performance of dyslexic children and good readers in both implicit and explicit versions of the sequence learning task, as well as in another implicit learning task not involving sequential information. The results showed that dyslexic children failed to learn the sequence when they were not informed about its presence (implicit condition). In contrast, they learned without significant differences in relation to the good readers group when they were encouraged to discover the sequence and to use it in order to improve their performance (explicit condition). Moreover, we observed that this implicit learning deficit was not extended to other forms of non-sequential, implicit learning such as contextual cueing. In this case, both groups showed similar implicit learning about the information provided by the visual context. These results help to clarify previous contradictory data, and they are discussed in relation to how the implicit sequence learning deficit could contribute to the understanding of dyslexia.

Learning disabilities are neurologically-based processing problems. These processing problems can interfere with learning basic skills such as reading, writing and/or math.  They can also interfere with higher level skills such as organization, time planning, abstract reasoning, long or short term memory and attention.

Saudi Arabia has been consistently honing its educational services for students with Learning disabilities (LD) since the recognition of the category by the Ministry of education in 1996. This review includes scholarly published articles and government websites to address the following research questions: 1) What were the main factors to influence the educational services offered to students with LD in Saudi Arabia within the past decade? 2) To what extent have these changes been implemented across genders? We conclude that the main factors include: legislation implementation, government support, awareness level of the society, globalization, and an increase in specialized cadre of Saudi special education professionals. Also, at this time, the LD services are equal across gender. Future research should focus on establishing a more specialized identification process, and provide greater training opportunities for both general and special education teachers on the needs of students with LD. Also, the authors suggest that highlighting the impact of collaboration between regular and special education teachers are essential.

What control should we have over our death? In this paper, I re-examine the way this question has been approached in the euthanasia debate by exploring what it means to take respon- sibility for one’s own life, especially in the face of mental dis- ability. I do so through presenting anthropological research on the role of care, autonomy, and responsibility in L’Arche—a Christian organization in the United Kingdom in which people with and without learning disabilities share community—to identify, contextualize, and challenge central assumptions about agency in the euthanasia debate.

Η εργασία πραγματεύεται τη σημασία της αξιολόγησης της φωνολογικής επεξεργασίας και της ακουστικής κατανόησης στην πρωτοσχολική ηλικία στην έγκαιρη πρόληψη μαθησιακών και ψυχοκοινωνικών δυσκολιών, καθώς και προτάσεις για την ενίσχυση αυτών των δεξιοτήτων.

Visual representations of prisons and their inmates are common in the news and social media, with stories about riots, squalor, drugs, self-harm and suicide hitting the headlines. Prisoners’ families are left to worry about the implications of such events on their kin, while those incarcerated and less able to understand social cues, norms and rules, are vulnerable to deteriorating mental health at best, to death at worst. As part of the life-story method in my research with offenders who are on the autism spectrum, have mental health problems and/or have learning difficulties, and prisoner’s mothers, I asked participants to take photographs, reflecting upon their experiences. Photographs in this case, were primarily used to help respondents consider and articulate their feelings in follow-up interviews. Notably, seeing (and imagining) is often how we make a connection to something (object or feeling), or someone (relationships), such that images in fiction, news/social media, drama, art, film and photographs can shape the way people think and behave – indeed feel about things and people. Images and representations ought to be taken seriously in researching social life, as how we interpret photographs, paintings, stories and television shows is based on our own imaginings, biography, culture and history. Therefore, we look at and process an image before words escape, by ‘seeing’ and imagining. How my participants and I ‘collaborate’ in doing visual methods and then how we make meaning of the photographs in storying their feelings, is insightful. As it is, I wanted to enable my participants to make and create their own stories via their photographs and narratives, whilst connecting to them, along with my own interpretation and subjectivities.

: New dyslexia advocacy efforts aim to detach the stigma of weakness from dyslexia. These efforts suggest new descriptions, ceasing to use the term, only emphasizing strengths and assuming dyslexics learn differently. The belief that all dyslexics have inherent and unique strengths may be myth or exception, not scientific fact. This program separates facts from myths concerning the neuropsychology of dyslexia and reviews neurodevelopmental multi-sensory intervention research relative to jointly developing individual’s strengths and improving phonological awareness and decoding skills.

Ada salah satu Lembaga survey di Universitas Indonesia yang
menyebutkan diakhir 2016 jumlah disabilitas di Indonesia ada sekitar
30 juta orang dan tingkat Pendidikan mereka di bawah 40%.
Bayangkan saja, jika 30 juta tadi tidak mandiri dan hanya bisa
meminta hak mereka, berapa orang di Indonesia yang akan
direpotkan oleh penyandang disabilitas?

Nah, dengan data ini, harusnya kita mulai sadar, bahwa menjamin
disabilitas dengan pemenuhan hak tidak membuat disabilitas di
negara ini lebih baik. Melainkan, kita nantinya malah menjadikan
disabilitas sebagai penuntut hak dan pemerintah sebagai pemberi
janji-janji.

Lalu bagaimana?