Learning difficulties at school age
Specific learning disabilities or specific developmental disorders of school abilities, as their exact scientific definition is, include the following disorders:
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specific reading disorder
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specific spelling disorder
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specific numerical ability disorder
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mixed school ability disorder
The conditions for their diagnosis are that the child has normal intelligence, has a significant deviation from the average for his age in terms of writing, reading, and mathematical abilities, and does not act external factors e.g. neglect, different cultural background.
Children diagnosed with specific learning disorder of reading may have the following symptoms:
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Slow reading pace.
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False starts, loss of place, repetition of reading a word.
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Inaccurate sentence segmentation
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Omissions, substitutions, distortions or additions of words or syllables to words.
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Reversals of words within sentences or letters within words.
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Inability to recall information from a text.
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Inability to draw conclusions and answer questions arising from the text.
Often, the specific learning difficulty of reading coexists with difficulty in written expression. Difficulties in spelling and specific learning difficulties of learning abilities may coexist with the aforementioned difficulties or be identified individually.
Indications of a learning difficulty may already be present from kindergarten, e.g. difficulty in developing phonological awareness, difficulty in distinguishing symbols, reduced auditory or visual memory. In any case, suspicion of such a difficulty should lead to a preventive developmental check.
Individual difficulties such as those mentioned above, if addressed in a timely manner, may prevent the manifestation of a specific learning difficulty in the first grades of elementary school.
For this very reason, the assessment of a child’s learning abilities in view of the start of the new school year can promptly diagnose such difficulties.
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