Neuropsychological Assessment of Adolescents with Learning Disabilities

Abstract

The background of the article is historical and cultural neuropsychology, which proposes analysis of learning activity from the level of its functional brain organization. Qualitative assessment of difficulties and functional analysis of syndromes permits to determine brain cortical and subcortical factors or mechanisms, which participate in fulfillment of different actions and operations of learning activity at school age. The objective of the present article is to contribute to consideration of ways and methods of neuropsychological assessment in cases of adolescents with learning disabilities and to share the opinion about the advantages of neuropsychological approach for the understanding of neuropsychological nature of learning disabilities in adolescents. Two cases of female adolescents with learning disability were included in the study. The scheme for neuropsychological assessment created for Spanish speaking patients was applied. Such kind of assessment permits to detect unique brain mechanism or factor responsible for pupil's difficulties.

Neuropsychological Performance of Adolescents with High and Low School Performance

“…As for the neuropsychological factor of RC, the main errors were related to the deficient execution of tasks that require maintaining an objective, which can condition difficulties during follow-up instructions, in the creation of plans, implementation of strategies of organization, verification and correction of one's own activity (Luria, 1995b;Portellano, 2018), and the effect of these difficulties could be observed in audio-verbal and visual retention tasks, where the students did not manage to maintain the volume of information and did not generate efficient memory strategies (Vygotsky, 1995a;Galperin, 2011;Bonilla, 2015;Solovieva, Bonilla-Sánchez, & Quintanar, 2018). Neurophysiological and neurological studies indicate that the voluntary components of the cognitive activity of programming and control, selective activity and action inhibition are achieved by the maturation of the frontal-thalamic system and its links with various cortical and sub-cortical structures, around 18 years old (Machinskaya, 2005;Blakemore, Burnett, & Dahl, 2010).…”