Describe symptoms of learning disabilities in children .

Symptoms of learning disabilities:

There are many symptoms of learning disabilities. They became manifest in different combinations in children who suffer from this disorder irrespective of their intelligence, motivation, and hard work for learning.

1. Difficulties in writing letters, words and phrases, reading out text, and speaking appear quite frequently. Quite often they have listening problems, although they may not have auditory defects. Such children are very different from others in developing learning strategies and plans.

2. Learning-disabled children have disorders of attention. They get easily distracted and cannot sustain attention on one point for long. More often than not, attentional deficiency lead to hyperactivity, i.e., they aware always moving, doing different things, trying to manipulate things incessantly.

3. Poor space orientation and inadequate sense of time are common symptoms. Such children do not get easily oriented to new surroundings and get lost. They lack a sense of time and are late or sometimes too early in their routine work. They also show confusion in direction and misjudge right, left, up and down.

4. Learning-disabled children have poor motor co-ordination and poor manual dexterity. This is evident in their lack of balance, inability to sharpen pencil, handle doorknobs, difficulty in learning to ride a bicycle, etc.

5. These children fail to understand and follow oral directions for doing things.

6. They misjudge relationship as to which classmates are friendly and which ones are indifferent. They fail to learn and understand body language.

7. Learning-disabled children usually show-perceptual disorders. These may include visual, auditory, tactual, and kinesthetic misperception. They fail to differentiate a call-bell from the ring of the telephone. It is not that they do not have sensory acuity. They simply fail to use it in performance.

8. Fairly large number of learning-disabled children have dyslexia. They quite often fail to copy letters and words; for example they fail to distinguish between 6 and d, p and q, P and 9. was and saw, unclear and nuclear, etc. They fail to organise verbal materials.

Difference between classical and operant conditioning:

1. In classical conditioning, the responses are under the control of some stimulus because they are reflexes, automatically elicited by the appropriate stimuli. Such stimuli are selected as unconditioned stimulus and responses elicited by them as unconditioned response. Thus Pavlovian conditioning, in which unconditioned stimulus elicits responses, is often called respondent conditioning.

In instrumental conditioning responses are under the control of the organism and are voluntary responses or operants. Thus, in the two forms of conditioning different types of responses are conditioned.

2. In classical conditioning the conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus are well-defined, but in operant conditioning conditioned stimulus is not defined. It can be inferred but is not directly known.

3. In classical conditioning, the experimenter controls the occurrence of unconditioned stimulus while in operant conditioning the occurrence of the reinforcer is under the control of the organism, that is learning. Thus, for in classical conditioning the organism remains passive, while in operant conditioning the subject has to be active in order to be reinforced.

4. In the two forms of conditioning, the technical terms used to characterise the experimental proceedings are different. Moreover what is called reinforcer in operant conditioning is called unconditioned stimulus in classical conditioning. As unconditional stimulus has two functions. In the beginning it elicits the response and also reinforces the response to be associated and elicited later on by the conditioned stimulus.

The principles of learning have great value for enriching human life in all spheres of life. Some of the applications of learning principles in treatment of maladjustive behaviours are as follows:

(i) In the case of those children and adults who exhibit irrational and unfounded fear with accompanying avoidance behaviour, implosive therapy and flooding are used. Implosive therapy starts with the person imagining their most feared form of contacl with the feared object, accompanied by vivid verbal descriptions by the therapist. The therapist functions as a coach. On the other hand, flooding is exposure that ( takes place in vivo. (e.g., with an actual feared object) and is considered to be the most effective of all treatments for fear.

(ii) To help those suffering from excessive anxieties and fears, the technique of systematic desensitisation is used. It is a form of behaviour therapy used to reduce phobic patients anxiety responses through counterconditioning, i.e. an attempt to reverse the process of classical conditioning by associating the crucial stimulus with a new conditioned response.

(iii) In order to eliminate habits that are undesirable and injurious for health and happiness, aversion therapy is used. The therapist arranges things in such a way that occurrence of maladjustive habits generates painful experiences and to avoid them clients learn to give them up. For example, alcohol is paired with an emetic drug (which induces severe nausea and vomiting) so that nausea and vomiting become a conditioned response to alcohol.

(iv) Modeling any systematic use of reinforcement for shaping and developing competence are extensively used.

(v) Persons suffering from excessive shyness and having difficulties in inter personal interactions are subjected to assertive learning. This therapy is also based on the principles of learning.

(vi) There are persons who lose mental peace with accelerated rate of breathing, loss of appetite, and rise in blood pressure at the slightest provocation. In such cases psychotherapists give biofeedback treatment. This technique is based on the interaction between classical and instrumental conditioning. In biofeedback, a bodily function (such as heart rate or blood pressure) is monitored and information about the function is fed back to the person to facilitate improved control of the physiological process.