1.What do you mean by learning difficulties?
Broadly speaking, learning difficulties refer to poor academic performance of children due to any cause, accounting for 5-10% of school-age children. The peak age of onset is the second and third grade of elementary school. Learning difficulties in a narrow sense are medically known as learning disabilities, and refer to children who have the opportunity to learn and whose academic performance is significantly behind what they can achieve at their intellectual level due to skills, psychological and environmental reasons.
2.What are the characteristics of children with learning difficulties?
(1) Poor
Poor academic performance Generally failing one or more main course exams
(2) Lazy
1, brain lazy: thinking is not active, refused or not good at opening the brain, often avoid those more brain exercises, thinking inertia, inattentive, easily distracted, good at mechanical memory, not good at language thinking, etc.
2, lazy hands: some children can talk, talk like a small machine gun mouth, even more than children of the same age, but just do not love to read and write words, reluctant to move the pen or just look at not write, when asked about learning, it is a sad face.
(3)Scattered
(1) distracted in class, many small movements in class, writing homework sloppily, often more than one stroke, less than one painting, Zhang Guan Li, left and right upside down, do not comply with discipline in school, talking casually in class, affecting other students learning, do not listen to the teacher’s discouragement I do what I want, serious disruption of classroom order.
(2)Wandering
Some children in school, do not dare to speak loudly, do not take the initiative to raise their hands to speak in class, and never affect others, but he himself is often distracted. The teacher lectures back home can not remember anything, homework to write until 11:00 or 12:00 at night to complete. The teacher often says that he comes to class, but his ears are left at home
(3) Lack of perseverance
Students with learning difficulties are obviously inferior to excellent students in terms of self-confidence and quality of will, easily give up when they encounter setbacks, and do things in a tiger’s head and a snake’s tail.
(4)Procrastination
Students with learning difficulties take the longest time to do homework every day, procrastinate on homework, after school not to write homework before playing but to play first and then write, or play while writing, homework is very slow, the time dragged out, some first grade students even write until 10 o’clock at night, resulting in lack of sleep, and affect the quality of the next day’s lectures.
(5) Clumsy
Clumsy movements, poor coordination, jumping rope, volleyball and other movements are obviously later than children of the same age.
3.Why do children have learning difficulties?
The main reasons why learning difficulties occur are as follows.
(1) Intellectual learning difficulties
The main reason is that the students are not sensitive enough and have a low ability to accept things, which accounts for about 15% of the students with learning difficulties. People with low IQ tend to lag behind those with high IQ in problem-solving ability and speed. They have memory difficulties, unstable attention span, slow comprehension, confusing expressions, and are unable to refer back to their knowledge. They tend to spend more time on learning than other students, but their performance is far inferior to other students, and their learning difficulties are manifested in a state of persistent difficulty in multiple subjects.
(2) Psychological-behavioral problems
is the main cause of children’s learning difficulties, mainly children with ADHD. This is followed by sensory integration disorder, learning skills disorder, school phobia, tic disorder, and adjustment disorder.
(3) Physical factors
Many parents have a misconception that a child is healthy if he or she does not have a fever or is not sick. In fact, the temporary absence of disease does not necessarily mean that the child is all right, many diseases in the early or latent period of the disease has affected the child’s learning such as anemia, trace element deficiency, lead poisoning, liver and kidney dysfunction can lead to poor physical fitness, inattention, memory difficulties, visual and hearing impairment can seriously affect the quality of children listening to lessons, so students should be regularly examined, timely detection and elimination of these hidden dangers affecting learning .
(4) Motivation factors
This part of the students have normal intelligence, flexible mind, only because of the deviation of learning motivation caused by learning difficulties, their main characteristics are: not interested in learning, lazy learning, do not like to use their brains and hands. In the learning process, the lack of self-control, can not adhere to always, some are overly ambitious, low vision, do not seek to understand, this part of the student psychological fragility, poor frustration tolerance.
(5) Study skill factor
These students have normal intelligence and good memory, but they do not know how to learn, and they do not have good study habits, as follows: they are slow to understand, they always learn by rote, they do not understand and master the inner connection of knowledge, and the knowledge they learn is in a fragmented and disorderly state, and they cannot form a knowledge structure, which results in poor comprehension; they have difficulty in coping with knowledge transfer problems and comprehensive arithmetic problems, and they lack the ability to learn from the crude and to learn by example. The ability to apply knowledge in practice in learning.
(6) Environmental factors
This part of the student’s intelligence is normal, their learning difficulties are often due to changes in the family, parent-child relationship tension, poor family cultural environment, serious family economic difficulties, teacher-student relationship, social influence, friendship problems or moral decline and other reasons that lead to learning difficulties. Their main characteristics are: they cannot go to school for special reasons, or they are mentally unstable in learning, such as fatigue, laziness, some of them show a sharp decline in academic performance, while with bad tendencies in ideological and moral behavior, unstable psychological state, emotional or depressed, or broken. This part of the struggling students is more complex, and more in terms of learning difficulties manifested as stages or localized.
4.Is there a relationship between learning difficulties and IQ?
IQ has a lot to do with learning difficulties. Children with low IQ definitely have difficulty learning, but children with learning difficulties do not necessarily have low IQ. The so-called IQ is a combination of the student’s memory, thinking, reasoning, imagination, calculation and other abilities, low IQ children of various abilities is poor, will certainly affect the student learning, a study found that the average IQ of children with learning difficulties is significantly lower than that of children with normal learning, the average IQ of children in general is about 100 points, the average IQ of children with learning difficulties is generally about 85 points, about 15% of students with learning difficulties is due to caused by low intelligence. Most children are not caused by intellectual deficiencies, but due to brain sensory integration disorder, ADHD, lack of motivation to learn and other reasons.
5. Are learning difficulties related to TV and television?
Many parents think that watching TV will grow their children’s knowledge and is good for learning, but otherwise watching TV, especially for a long time, can seriously affect children’s learning. There are several main reasons for this.
(1) Watching TV affects brain growth and development
Newborn baby’s brain weighs an average of three hundred and thirty grams, a quarter of an adult, and has grown three times by the age of two, and is 90% of an adult by the age of seven. All animal experiments have found a close relationship between brain growth and experience. The stimulation of a “rich” environment is conducive to brain development and functional maturation.
Television programs often feature flashing colors, close-ups, and loud decibels in order to capture the attention of viewers. These seemingly rich stimuli only stimulate the more primitive parts of the brain, and passive television viewing replaces active participation by children.
(2) Watching television harms children’s reading ability
The effect of television on children’s reading is not only to rob children of time to read, but also to disrupt the learning of the visual system. When watching television, there is little eye movement; the eyes simply stare at the TV fluorescent screen, with neither dilated pupils nor little, if any, movement back and forth, and there is a lack of general browsing activity. This makes the ability to search, browse, and focus needed to develop reading habits impaired.
Because television programs use a variety of tricks to attract children’s attention, but mainly attract passive rather than active attention, children become accustomed to learning due to external stimuli rather than spontaneous active learning, and once they encounter a difficult problem, their minds drift elsewhere and wait for the channel to change.
(3) Television affects children’s imagination.
When children read books, they must create all the plots themselves. While watching, children have to imagine the characters, figure out their emotions, simulate their tone of voice, and create the environment around the characters and imagine the feeling of the environment. This self-creation is important, but television does not leave room for this creative process to play out. The problem caused by watching TV is that children are used to not using their imaginative thinking skills at all.
6. Are learning difficulties related to ADHD?
Childhood ADHD, also known as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children, is the main factor causing learning difficulties in children with IQ, with a prevalence of 3-7%, and generally 2-3 ADHD students in a class of about 50 students. The main manifestations are inattentiveness, such as small movements in class, the idea of desertion; hyperactivity, more than the average children of the same age naughty, “hand bitch”, love to provoke people; poor self-control, manifested as impulsive capricious, sex clear impatient, good temper, easy to cry, easy to laugh, talk a lot, love to interrupt; homework delay, carelessness, academic performance fluctuations, exams The same paper, completed under the supervision of the teacher or parents, has better results.
7. How can parents identify these problems early?
The problem of learning difficulties exists as early as infancy, but is ignored by mothers and fathers because it does not yet have a direct impact on life and learning. It is only when the child’s academic performance is directly affected after school that parents pay attention to it, but at this time intervention and correction is already a bit of a “mending of the fold”. The earlier we intervene in children’s problems, the more we can reduce the impact on school and produce good corrective effects.
Through clinical observation, there are several situations that can help parents.
(1) The child was born with a history of high-risk medical conditions such as prematurity, premature birth, multiple births, hypoxia at birth, aging placenta, and maternal hyperemesis.
(2) The child is slower in development than children of the same age, such as learning to walk and talk late, and has poor self-care skills.
(3) Lack of language development, lack of eye contact when communicating with others, little active language, and repetitive language.
(4) Clumsy movements, easy to fall down, hyperactivity, impatience and crying.
(5) Communication disorders, unable to establish friendship, poor relationship with children, aggressive.
(6) Slow to learn things, poor memory, easy to forget.
(7) Childish behavior, incompatible with age, prefers to play with younger children, does not like to read books, does not like to put together toys, and likes simple repetitive games.
If the child early appear the above performance, should cause parents to pay great attention, to immediately take the child to the children’s health care institutions for examination, so as not to miss the best time for diagnosis and treatment.
8.How should a child with learning difficulties be treated?
(1) Develop a comprehensive correction plan
Because learning difficulties are caused by a combination of biological, psychological, social and other factors, a single treatment is often ineffective, these students are often more difficult to discipline than the average child because of the characteristics of their own learning difficulties, which requires parents and teachers to master the psychological characteristics of children with learning difficulties, under the guidance of psychologists, parents, teachers, doctors, students together to develop a comprehensive correction program. This includes educational guidance, behavior therapy, medication, attention and learning ability training.
(2) Cooperate with necessary medication
Some parents are worried about the side effects of drugs and often refuse to medication, such as ADHD and other diseases caused by learning difficulties drugs purely educational intervention is often ineffective, need to be combined with the necessary medication, and these drugs are more than 50 years of clinical practice of the old drugs, the effect is certain, under the guidance of doctors to use generally will not produce side effects, so parents can rest assured.
(3) Psychological behavior training
Sensory integration training, EEG biofeedback training to enhance the child’s attention, improve learning ability will play a very good effect. Sensory integration training through the game to improve the brain’s ability to process information through specific exercises, thus achieving the effect of enhancing brain function; EEG biofeedback training is to increase the attention of children by increasing certain brain waves, which has a great effect on the improvement of learning ability and IQ.
9, learning difficulties common personality problems?
(1) shirking responsibility
Poor performance is often attributed to internal reasons such as lack of effort and unrealistic learning; while students with learning difficulties often attribute their poor academic performance to external reasons such as bad teachers, unfair judgments, and insufficient parental counseling, making excuses for themselves rather than checking themselves, learning lessons, and not daring to face up to their own shortcomings.
(2) Lack of interest
Lack of interest in learning, feeling that school life is boring, disliking teachers and homework, and feeling unhappy at school because of the tense interpersonal relationship at school. Easily satisfied, complacent when their grades are slightly better, tend to look behind them to see how many students are not as good as they are, instead of looking at how many students they have who are better than they are.
(3) Psychological behavior problems Because students with learning difficulties are often criticized by teachers, parents scolded, discrimination by classmates, often not respected and caressed, over time the formation of low self-esteem, isolation, anxiety, depression, disassociation, aggression or withdrawal behavior and other undesirable character, the serious susceptible to the influence of bad social trends, and theft, truancy and even illegal crime.
10.How can parents adjust their mindset?
(1) Face the reality and overcome the fluke mentality
After the child has learning difficulties, a more sensible approach is to face the reality, do not avoid the disease, early detection of the problem, early intervention, early treatment. The earlier the intervention, the greater the plasticity of the child, the better the results, otherwise the time will be lost. It is true that the diagnosis of mental retardation and autism is difficult for parents to accept, but it should be clearly understood that the disease exists objectively and early corrective training is the best choice.
(2) Look carefully for the causes of learning difficulties
After a child has learning difficulties, a psychologist should be called to make a scientific and objective evaluation of the child’s intellectual structure, memory ability, language ability, calculation ability, reasoning ability, imagination, attention, personality tendency, and social adaptation ability, and to make purposeful training according to the results of the evaluation, and to correct the child’s intellectual defects and other deficiencies through special education training, or through some The training of non-intellectual factors, such as the cultivation of learning motivation, can enable children with learning difficulties to make up for their intellectual deficiencies in the learning process and correct their bad personalities, so that the child’s academic performance can be improved.
First of all, children’s health care institutions to test the child’s intelligence, because a person’s IQ is like the height of each person has high and low. According to the Wechsler IQ test IQ includes total IQ, verbal IQ and operational IQ, the average IQ of the population is 100 points, so if your child’s IQ is one standard deviation below the average IQ (15 points), we think your child is not very smart, so the requirements for learning and even the learning environment should be special requirements. If your child does not have an IQ problem after an IQ test, but still cannot learn properly, you may want to observe your child for signs of inattention or hyperactivity to rule out the presence of ADHD in children.
In addition, children’s learning difficulties can also occur due to non-intellectual factors that lead to a lack of motivation to learn, a large number of homework arrears, and a serious obstruction to the acceptance of new knowledge, which is not related to innate qualities, and generally manifests itself as a lack of motivation to learn and poor academic performance in various subjects.
(3) Learn the necessary psychological knowledge and learn some basic skills to counsel your child
It is important to be familiar with the psychological characteristics of children at different ages, to understand your child objectively, to have a correct evaluation of your child’s intellectual structure, innate strengths and weaknesses, and to understand your child’s personality and developmental trends. Under the guidance of a psychologist, learn some techniques for dealing with children’s behavior problems and behavioral treatment methods, such as: how to encourage children to achieve the best results, how to improve children’s interest in learning, how to correct children’s bad habits, etc.