What are some common learning difficulties that children have?
There are several types of conditions that can significantly interfere with learning. These can be caused not only by emotional but also cognitive, sensory or specific problems that can result in the loss of the school year. Differentiating these factors is not easy, therefore, it is important that parents acquire a responsibility commitment with the professional caregiver for the child, through the joint work they do with the teachers.
These learning difficulties have a neurobiological basis that affects the cognitive processes involved in language, reading, writing and/or arithmetic, (attention, memory, perception) with have important implications for academic development.
Reading and writing difficulties
Characteristic features of these disorders are the confusion of phonemes, the rotation or substitution of letters, union or fragmentation of words, spelling mistakes that are not specific to the learning process of orthographic rules, slow reading, low reading comprehension, etc. Most of these kinds of difficulties are classified as f dyslexia, dysgraphia, discographies and difficulties in reading comprehension.
Attention problems
Children with difficulties and attention problems with or without hyperactivity will have difficulties in learning, which can affect reading, writing, calculating or solving problems. In the classroom the children have difficulty paying attention to the learning stimuli, therefore they will have difficulty to follow the explanations of the teacher, to acquire new learning, or for example to complete the exams. They are easily distracted and it is not that they do not want to attend, we can say that they do not know what to attend to.
Mathematics problems
Children have difficulties in understanding and managing numbers and quantities, in basic mathematical operations (addition and subtraction), in understanding the place occupied by each number in a number, writing numbers with investments, for example writing 23 and reading 32 instead, and difficulties in solving problems. Most child healthcare professionals would diagnose kids with these learning difficulties as having dyscalculia, or difficulties in mathematical reasoning.
Can doctors or teachers assess learning difficulties?
Yes, doctors use a series of test to determine what kind of learning difficulty a child may have. Once the assessment is made and the deficiencies are known, the treatment consisting of interactive learning is applied, through stimulation and exercises of Attention, concentration, memory, mental agility, motor maturity and progressive muscle relaxation. They will also work on techniques and study habits as well as school motivation talks. Parents need to be actively involved in this sort of treatment for the child. This will ensure that the treatment will have the most impact and lead to more success.
It is fundamental that before any suspicion of learning difficulties that parents go to a professional who guides us and advises and makes a detection and diagnosis of it. Children with some kind of learning problem need appropriate teaching and learning strategies. These difficulties are diagnosed from when they are 6 or even 7 years of age usually. Earlier is better so that doctors and teachers can detect are warning signs that must be addressed, because the sooner they are involved in them, the less impact they will have on the children’s learning.