Profile of Deficits on Assessment Battery in Children with Specific Learning Disorders

Abstract

Learning disabilities affects the acquisition, organization, retention, understanding, or use of verbal or nonverbal information. They usually result from impairments in memory, attention, phonological processing, language processing, visuospatial processing, and so forth leading to inabilities in oral language like speaking and understanding the grammatical constructions, reading like phonetic knowledge and word recognition, written language like spellings and alphabet recognition, and also arithmetic like computation.The aim of the current study is to show the profile in learning disabled children.Brigance Basic Skills List and the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) index of specific learning disabilities are used for the purpose. The Brigance Basic Skills List is designed to assess visuomotor skills, visual discrimination, acquisition of gross motor and fine motor skills, and acquisition of alphabets and numbers. The NIMHANS index in addition to the above also assesses the reading, writing, spellings, and arithmetic skills of the subjects and other functions like attention, memory, and perceptual motor functions of the subjects. The sample was drawn from the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric clinic of outpatient of Department of Psychiatry, Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India. It comprised of 20 subjects within the age range of 10 to 18 years with learning disabilities in one or more areas along with difficulties. They were all belonging to middle-to upper-middle socioeconomic status and were studying in private school setup.The results show the profile of the subjects on attention in terms of distractibility and impulsiveness, the memory profile, perceptual motor functions, basic academic skills in terms of visual and auditory discrimination, concept and sequencing of letters and numbers, and the type of errors in terms of their reading, writing, spellings, and arithmetic skills.