Learning Disabilities

John Elkins

This article advocates an approach to supporting students who experience difficulties in learning, irrespective of nosology, particularly in the key areas of literacy and numeracy. In the state of Queensland, Australia, a distinction has been made between students' experiencing learning difficulties and those who have learning disabilities (LD). However, government priorities for improved achievement in literacy and numeracy have focused schools on the performance of all low-achieving students, without regard to diagnostic category. Many are now mobilizing a schoolwide effort that combines resources into a unified plan, using a three-wave approach. The first wave is high-quality classroom teaching, the second is early intervention, and the third is ongoing support for those students who have persistent difficulties, using adapted instruction and intensive tutoring. A further theme is the promise of neuropsychological advances for giving meaning to the underlying impairments of some students--who do have LD--that justifies the provision of adaptations to sustain their learning throughout their schooling and beyond. Throughout this article, the different yet converging understandings of LD in Australia and the United States are tracked, with suggestions made for future research that avoid the problems of operationalizing the definition of LD proposed by Keogh in 1982.