The causes of retardation in school children like natural causes arised home or school and can inhibit learning in school children. It is important to study these home causes and school causes of the special children inorder to position ourself on the helping hand for pupils whenever the need arises.Kuppuswamy (2001)mentions the tripple methods in which the teacher can teach the concept ,test the concept and then teach out of the weaknesses noticed in children .The possible home causes are:
♣the socio-economic and political background,
♣poverty and inadequate care,
♣restriction in language experience,
♣sensory deprivation,
♣parental attitude/early experience,
♣emotional deprivation,
♣socially deprived home.
And the school possible causes are:
♣authoritarian teachers and school heads,
♣lack of learning facilities and limiting curriculum,
♣teacher unprofessionalism,
Before we look at these environments which can cause children retardation ,lets first identify some of the learning disabilities.
Home is the immediate environment the child learns before introduced to formal education at school.
It is easy to identify physically handicapped and severely retarded children well before they enter the school.Some problems of the special children come to light only when a child has entered school and failing to cope with certain task a child is expected to do successfully. The problems that might take a long time for the teacher to identify are mainly in the learning disabilities category .(Glinch in Gibson 1976:387).The identified learning disabilities are:
•Poor body awareness:A child might show signs of confusion in doing tasks which require him/her to arrange things logically or in a sequence.This poor body awareness could be revealed by a child's drawings of human being showing arms extending from the head.A normal child should not have this problem at a concrete operational stage. A child could have problems in writing.Poor ability to coordinate movement and vision.Some children has problem of combining movement and vision.During playing these children might show a poor eye-hand coordination.The child ,for example catches the ball before it reaches .A child show clumsiness inability to follow a moving target and difficulty in judging distance.
Visual inefficiency:Teachers should be aware of children who have vision and yet have an inability to notice particular features in the environment. A child may have problem of seeing when sitting on a certain position in the classroom, especially seeing what is written on the charts or boards.
•Poor listening ability:The child who is poor in listening ,because of difficulties in processing information to keep up with the speaker(teacher).The inability may also be of distinguishing sounds and in some instances the child can be distracted by all kinds of noises.
•Integrating information from several sensory channels:The children with problems of integrating information from several sensory channels may be capable of handling tasks that are mainly visual and auditory ,but find some difficulties in associating them. A child might have problems in associating letters of the alphabet and their sounds.
•Poor grasp of sequence:In the classroom situation teachers may come across pupils with problems in grasping facts in their sequential order.The difficulties may be of remembering ,for example days of the week in their sequential order ,or word order in compound word,viz:ful successful.
•Poor sense of rhythm:The disability is shown in children with problems of reciting poems ,singing ,dancing ,bouncing a ball or skipping.
•Problems in style of learning:A child may be good in analytic and intutive performance and yet have difficulties to remember numbers. This child may not recall telephone numbers,muiltplication tables or dates in history.
•Problems with concepts: Children with concepts problems ,find it difficult to form categories and to recognise differences and similarities between objects.This may be as result of poor development of time,number and space.
•Gaps in general knowledge:The children with this problems may be identified through their inability to learn basic general information .The general information may be ,parents' first names,profession ,number of family members ,their names in sequential order ,the
position of the said child in the family.
Please note that none of these children's learning disability categories is exclusive .In some case other children could have several learning disabilities concurrently.Teacher's implication is to identify the child's root problem and look for strategic diagnosis.
No comments:
Post a Comment