Understanding Processing Deficits

Andrea Stevenson Crisp,School Psychologist

Marcia WilliamsParent

Andrea CroninSpecial education resource teacher

Activity

Processing refers to how the brain takes in, uses, learns, reasons, stores, retrieves, and expresses information.

EVERYONE PROCESSES! Some individuals may have more difficulty in one or more areas of processing,

What do we mean when we say PROCESSING?

Since Public Law 94-142, federal legislation has defined a learning disability as

“a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, that may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or to do mathematical calculations.”

Definition of a Learning Disability

Learning, gaining knowledge and procedures, depends on the integration of many processes in the human brain.

Taking in selected information through one or more senses

(Visual and Auditory)

Manipulating that information in short-

term or working memory

Encoding the information into long-

term storage

Retrieving the information to

produce an expression or response.

General learning cycle

Working memory

Auditory Processing Visual Processing

Visual Motor Processing

Executive ProcessingMetacognition

Long-Term Storage and Retrieval

ExpressionResponse

Attention

Short term memory Working memory Long term retrieval and storage

Memory

Memory activity

milk banana

Oak hurricane

apple refraction

ocean blue

Buick Maple

petulance Dodge

mustard wind

Chevrolet hamburger

orange kiwi

ubiquitous onion

Pine nurse

SHORT TERM MEMORY requires storage of information for a brief period of time.

WORKING MEMORY is conscious

processing.

It involves manipulation of

information.

Short term memory

1) uses information that is available in short term memory or retrieves information from long-term memory (or both)

2) performs some action on these two stores of information

3) then stores the new product in long-term memory or uses it to make a response.

Working Memory…where learning takes place

Working memory capacity is limited.

Automaticity is the idea that information can be processed with little effort or attention.

So, a reader who has developed decoding automaticity has more working memory resources to devote to reading comprehension.

The ability to store information in long-term memory and fluently retrieve it later.

It’s the process of storing (encoding) and retrieving information. It’s not necessarily the knowledge that is stored in long-term memory, but HOW the brain stores and retrieves that information.

Some students have information in long-term memory but have difficulty retrieving it. They can recognize information and understand it, but cannot express what they know.

Long-Tem Storage and Retrieval

Encoding Strategies:◦ Frequent practice and repetition◦ Visual cues◦ Mnemonics◦ Connecting information to prior knowledge

Retrieval Strategies:

Multiple choice Color coding Word bank Visual cues

Memory strategies

Working memory processes information that is both VISUAL and AUDITORY.

Visual Processing involves how well your brain can use, interpret, and process visual information.

◦ Seeing differences between things

◦ Remembering visual details

◦ Filling in missing parts in pictures

◦ Visualization and imagination

◦ Spatial relations

Visual Processing

Have difficulty seeing similarities and differences in pictures, letters, numbers, words, and groups of objects.

Confuse left from right when presented with visual materials

Have difficulty recognizing the same word when repeated in a sentence or passage

Have difficulty remembering and sequencing visual information (letters and numbers)

Have difficulty seeing spatial relationships and patterns.

A person with a weakness in Visual Processing may

Accommodations for Visual Processing

Deficits

Visual-Motor difficulties are typically associated with difficulties with writing and hand/eye coordination tasks

Visual-Motor Processing Difficulties

Have difficulty with hand-eye coordination tasks (cutting with scissors, catching a ball)

Have difficulty forming letters when printing or writing

Have difficulty copying from the board or book

Have difficulty planning and placing a written product on a page

Students with Visual-Motor delays may

Accommodations and Strategies for Visual-

Motor Delays

Video

How difficult can this be?

Auditory Processing involves how well a student can understand and process auditory information that is presented orally.

Auditory Processing

◦ Hearing differences between sounds/voices

◦ Remembering specific words or numbers

◦ Remember general sound patterns

◦ Understanding even when they miss some sounds

◦ Blending parts of words together

Auditory processing involves:

Take longer to answer questions orally Have difficulty remembering information

presented orally Have difficulty listening to and

comprehending information given orally Asks for oral questions and directions to be

repeated Have difficulty following multi-step

directions presented orally

Students with Auditory Processing difficulties may

Students with difficulties in auditory processing usually have the most difficulty in reading, writing, and language (understanding and expressing).

Auditory discrimination◦ The ability to recognize differences in phonemes

(sounds)

◦ Auditory memory:The ability to store and recall information which was

given verbally..

Auditory sequencing: the ability to remember or reconstruct the order of items in a list or the order of sounds in a word.

Auditory blending: the process of putting together phonemes to form words. (the individual phonemes “c”, “a”, and “t” are blended to form the word “cat”).

Accommodations for Auditory Processing

Difficulties

Executive Processing oversees and manages all other types of cognitive processing.

Executing Processing includes:◦ Setting goals◦ Planning◦ Self-monitoring◦ Self-regulating◦ Solving problems◦ Adjusting

Executive Processing

Many students with ADHD and learning disabilities have deficiencies in Executive Processing.

Executive Processing

Accommodations for Executive Processing

Difficulties

Attention

When an individual consciously uses executive control processes, it is METACOGNITION.

Making the decision to write down a grocery list because you know you can’t remember everything, is metacognition.

Knowing one’s processing strengths and weaknesses is very important to metacognition.

A reader with good metacognition will be aware of when they come to a word they don’t know or doesn’t make sense. Poor readers often don’t detect errors in the text and are unaware that they are lacking comprehension as they read.

MetacognitionKnowing what you know

Self-Advocacy

It’s critical that students understand how they learn and

what they need to do to be successful.

If they have a disability, teach them about their disability and what it means

about how they learn.

Questions