#15 "Sorting Out SLD, LD, Dyslexia, and ADHD"

Episode 15 explains the difference between Dyslexia, LD, SLD, and ADHD and helps the listener understand both the similarities and the differences in the terms and will help you avoid some of the confusion many people experience around learning disabilties in general. 

Transcript

Mickie Hayes  0:00 
Do you ever find yourself trying to make sense out of all the different terminology? If your child has a disability, dyslexia, learning disability, ADHD? Are they the same thing? Or are they not the same thing today, my goal is to sort out the definitions for those terms and try to give you some sense of what they all mean and why they don't mean the same things. Welcome to Episode 15, "Sorting out SLD, LD, Dyslexia, and ADHD" by Mickie Hayes.

Mickie Hayes  0:31 
So let's start with dyslexia, and learning disability, also referred to as LD. Think of a learning disability as the big picture. Learning Disabilities show up when an individual has difficulty with reading, their reading is inaccurate, it's slow, it takes a lot of effort to get through a piece of text, the student may have difficulty understanding the meaning of the words, they may have difficulty with spelling, sometimes their problems extend to writing things down in the written expression, grammar, punctuation, that sort of thing. And then you have students who have difficulties with number concepts and facts and calculations in math reasoning, those are all different characteristics under the big umbrella of a learning disability. So when a person has a learning disability, which can be called Specific Learning Disability, also abbreviated as SLD, they have to be evaluated for that, because what a learning disability evaluation is going to do, it's going to zero in specifically on the kinds of issues that your child is facing. Now, specific learning disabilities is a common term that you'll see out there. And it's often used interchangeably with learning disabilities. And it simply means problem with reading, possibly writing, but not necessarily math or math may be a struggle, but hey, they can read pretty good but but they have trouble getting their information down on a piece of paper, or in some cases, their learning disability covers all the areas, and they may have struggles with reading, writing, and math. But the only way to find that out is through a psychological evaluation. And the psychological evaluation will give you some insights into which areas your child is struggling with the most. It will break the information down into sub tests and other data that helps you to really get a handle hopefully, on how to help your child the best way possible. I had a student once who could not read complex college vocabulary and terminology, but he could tell me what it meant. He couldn't identify the word he couldn't pronounce it, but he could define it. But it was just his type of learning disability. And this shows you that learning disabilities come in all shapes and sizes, and variations. Now dyslexia is a term that is often used to define a learning disability. But dyslexia is only that part of the learning disability that deals with reading. An individual who is dyslexic has trouble with the words themselves. It is a visual processing problem. They have trouble making sense of the words, letters flip on the pages, they sometimes overlap the word sometimes disappear, they shrink, they stretch, I had one student tell me that the words would tunnel down when he looked at the text on the page. So he was constantly trying to sort out the words that he was reading. But it was like looking down a tunnel to figure out what they said. When you are struggling so much with getting the physical text off of the page and into your brain, and it's not a vision problem, it is a dyslexic reading problem. When you have this kind of a situation, other reading related issues suffer. So you don't have good fluency. You don't necessarily have good comprehension. You may have poor word recognition, because everything gets mixed up. So an individual who is dyslexic needs certain skills, certain strategies that can help with those kinds of problems. When that individual gets into the college level, that person is better off at that point, to look for opportunities to circumvent the dyslexia. So that individual should be reading using a resource like learning ally.org, which has recorded textbooks for students with disabilities or using a note taker in class to take the notes, anything that's going to circumvent the reading issue, the dyslexia issue that that individual has, so that they can show what they know. So dyslexia is only one part of a learning disability. Now, oftentimes, students will have dysgraphia, which is the written expression, getting those things down on the paper, and that can be a real struggle. It may be a fine motor coordination, but it may be just the inability to take the words from the brain onto a piece of paper for whatever reason. And then an individual who struggles with the math end of things may have something called dyscalculia. And dyscalculia is also a form of dyslexia. But it deals with math. So terminology like dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, those kinds of expressions are subcategories, under learning disabilities, and now when you talk about ADHD, that is not a learning disability. And I have had many, many students tell me they had a learning disability, and when I looked at their documentation and had further conversation with them, what they had in reality was ADHD. Now ADHD is different because where a learning disability taps into certain subject areas, certain content, certain characteristics of reading, writing, or math, ADHD process, all of those genres. ADHD affects every part of that person's ability as a student, because with ADHD, something is getting in the way. It could be in attentiveness, it could be distractibility, but something is distracting that person from doing the job that they need to do and from staying on task, not only in one subject, but pretty much across the board. Now there may be some areas academically where, because they have a strong interest level in it, their ADHD isn't as significant. But in most cases, the impulsivity, the distractibility those sorts of things cross all levels of learning disability, between 25% and 40%, depending on the research that you look at, get the double whammy. In other words, they not only have a learning disability, but on top of that they have ADHD. So an individual that has both of those things combined, they call it comorbid. When an individual has both of those things combined, they struggle with first trying to make sense of the word on the page, and then hold it in their brain long enough to keep them from being distracted to something else. And it's easy to lose where you were at in a book or a text if you're suddenly distracted. So while your brain is trying really, really hard to figure out what's on that page, the ADHD part of your brain is going what's that who just walked past and so that combination presents almost a double challenge to some students. So those students in particular need to talk to disability services and find accommodations that can help them out. Some students have a learning disability, some students have ADHD and some students have both at the same time. I hope that clears up some of the confusion with the terminology. The bottom line is learning disability, LD and specific learning disability SLD are both the same thing. dyslexia is one type of a learning disability with visual processing problems. And ADHD is not a learning disability, but it is an attention disorder that can impact a learning disability. In a future podcast, I will go over more specific information about learning disabilities, but my purpose today was to just help you sort through some of the vocabulary that's out there that tends to confuse people. So I hope it made a difference of just exactly what is going on with your child or with yourself if that's the case, when you are dealing with dyslexia, or learning disability or ADHD, you might want to check out a mickie teachers.com m i c k i eteachers.com. I have some resources on it that you may find helpful and I also have a newsletter that you can sign up for. So it's a free newsletter called Getting Ready for College to help you help your child with disability be prepared to enter the world of college. Thank you very much for your attention today. I'll talk to next week. Take care. Bye. The information contained throughout this podcast has been gleaned from my own personal experiences, but to ensure accuracy please contact the Disability Services at the College of your choice to have first hand information and the most up to date policies and procedures followed for your particular institution of higher education. The content in any of these podcasts is not intended as a substitute for information from legal, educational or medical professionals. Always seek the advice of your attorney or qualified health care provider with any questions you may have with regards to illegal educational or medical concerns.

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