Training People With Learning Disabilities In A Virtual Environment - Dissertation Example

Learning disabilities affect a significant segment of the world's population. The incidence of learning disabilities is most prevalent in developed societies and has become more widely recognized as medical knowledge has advanced and research has been undertaken to determine the nature and underlying causes of the many conditions that have been defined. As the support of such research and the assistive programs that devolve from them fall under various national governances, accordingly different regions of the world employ somewhat different definitions of the term “learning disability”.

The definitions employed in North America, for example, differ from that employed in the United Kingdom by making finer or more detailed distinctions between the conditions that qualify as learning disabilities. The United States and Canada both refer to various conditions as “specific learning disabilities”, sometimes referring to them as “learning differences” or “learning discrepancies” [Houck, 1984]. In the vernacular of those countries, learning disabilities are restricted to specific cognitive conditions, primarily dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, and other conditions in which a physiological difference can be attributed as causal, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Torgesen (1979) refers to these as psychological process disorders “which transform and manipulate information between the time it enters as a stimulus and the time a response to it is selected”. Such conditions are deemed to directly affect the action of learning. The North American definition does not include other conditions such as autism spectrum disorder and Down’s syndrome as specific learning disabilities, seeing them instead as physiological differences that impair the action of learning indirectly.