Learning Disabilities Characteristics
What are some of the common characteristics of LD?
The following is a list of common characteristics of an LD student. Conditions must be persistent over a long period of time. Presence of these conditions does not necessarily mean a person is learning disabled.
Reading Skills
- Poor decoding skills
- Poor reading fluency
- Slow reading rate
- Lack of self-monitoring reading skills
- Poor comprehension and/or retention
- Difficulty identifying important ideas in context
- Extreme difficulty building ideas and images
- Difficulty integrating new ideas to existing knowledge
- Weak vocabulary skills
- Extreme difficulty understanding words or grammar
- Difficulty recognizing high frequency words
- Oral comprehension is noticeably stronger than reading comprehension
- Extreme difficulty focusing attention on the printed marks
- Difficulty controlling eye movements across the page
- Wavy or shimmering pages not attributable to poor vision
Spelling Skills
- Phonological awareness is noticeably stronger than spelling ability
- Frequent spelling errors of high frequency words
- Extreme difficulty with homonyms and/or regular spelling patterns
- No understanding of the relationship of phonics to written language
- No understanding of common spelling rules
- Inadequate understanding of phonics even with instruction
Written Expression Skills
- Poor writing fluency
- Unable to compose complete, grammatical sentences
- Difficulty organizing written information
- Poor handwriting
- Extremely poor alignment
- Inability to take notes or copy information from a book or the board
- Oral expression is noticeably stronger than written expression
- Extremely weak proofreading skills
Oral Language Skills
- Inability to hear small differences between sounds, not attributable to a hearing loss, particularly vowel sounds
- Difficulty articulating thoughts or ideas orally
- Difficulty pronouncing words
- Inability to blend sounds together to form words
- Difficulty listening and responding to a series of directions
- Disorganized recall of facts or details
Mathematical Skills
- Poor mathematical fluency
- Difficulty memorizing multiplication tables
- Difficulty identifying multiples and/or factors
- Poor basic calculation skills
- Difficulty understanding word or application problems
- Poor understanding of mathematical concepts
- Difficulty sorting out irrelevant information
- Lower visual perceptual and visual-spatial ability
- Inability to transfer basic mathematical concepts to solve problems with unpredictable information
- Inability to use basic facts within more complex calculations
Memory Skills
- Extremely weak ability to store and retrieve information efficiently
- Extremely weak ability to hold information for immediate use
Reasoning Skills
- Extremely weak ability to solve problems, particularly when information or procedure is unfamiliar
- Extreme difficulty recognizing, transforming, or using specific information to reach general conclusions