Disability Awareness: Learning Disability and Physical Disability

Running head: DISABILITY AWARENESS
LEARNING DISABILITY ASSIGNMENT
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2DISABILITY AWARENESS
Disability is termed as impairments that could affect any individual’s cognitive
mental and physical wellness and abilities. This condition might present at birth or acquired
in the lifetime, due to which individual and their cognitive ability, physical strength and
mental peace are affected1. This paper would focus on two disabilities such as Learning
disability and physical disability.
Learning disability:
Learning disability is a health condition which includes mental illness and affect the
learning ability of the affected individual due to which, they suffer from critical mental health
conditions2. Several learning disability are progressive health condition, in which the affected
individual suffers from impaired social skills, speech issues, repetitive behaviour and non-
verbal communication3. One example of learning disability is Autism Spectrum disease, and
as the disease is based on its spectrum, for each affected individual, it exerts different
strengths and weaknesses4. The physical, social, intellectual, lingual and emotional aspects of
these conditions are as follows.
Physical effect
Physical effects of learning disability could range from developmental disorder,
mental effect of specific physical disability. Majority of the children affected with learning
disability has been found affected with anxiety, stress and due to such conditions, they
developed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or other developmental disorders5.
1 Oliver, Mike. "Defining impairment and disability: Issues at stake." In Disability and Equality Law,
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2 Torgesen, Joseph K. "Phonologically based reading disabilities: Toward a coherent theory of one kind
of learning disability." In Perspectives on learning disabilities, pp. 106-135. Routledge, 2018.
3 Alfonso, Vincent C., and Dawn P. Flanagan. Essentials of specific learning disability identification.
John Wiley & Sons, 2018.
4 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC. "Prevalence and characteristics of autism spectrum
disorder among children aged 8 years--Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 11 sites,
United States, 2012." Morbidity and mortality weekly report. Surveillance summaries (Washington, DC: 2002)
65, no. 3 (2016): 1-23.
5 Espelage, Dorothy L., Chad A. Rose, and Joshua R. Polanin. "Social-emotional learning program to
reduce bullying, fighting, and victimization among middle school students with disabilities." Remedial and
special education 36, no. 5 (2015): 299-311.

3DISABILITY AWARENESS
Further, affected hand and leg movements, affected coordination, affected fine motor skills
are observed in patients affected with learning disability.
Emotional effects
Due to the learning disability, affected individuals vary depending on their learning,
thinking, problem solving and other abilities. It was also seen that learning disability not only
affects the social connection but also hampers the emotional wellbeing of the person. Due to
social stigma and discrimination, they become unable to share their thoughts and ideations
within the society and hence, isolation prevails in their life. Hence, extreme high and extreme
low emotions are observed in affect children with tendency of withdrawal and anger6.
Intellectual effects
Due to affected learning and understanding abilities, affected children are unable to
understand the learnings and unable to apply their critical thinking hence their intellectual
quotient are low. Further, they are unable to understand the number and mathematical factors
and hence, they suffer from impaired learning abilities. Several researchers has identified to
the fact that children with learning disabilities are affected with impaired IQ and their
readings are less than 207. Therefore, they are unable to learn at the equal pace if compared to
a non- learning disability affected child. Hence, this is how the intellectual disability would
affect the child.
Language effects
Majority of children affected with learning disability are unable to understand the
speech and are unable to use speech to convey their thoughts. Their spoken and writing
language skills are affected due to the occurrence of learning disability. It has been observed
6 Van der Kolk, Bessel A. "Developmental Trauma Disorder: Toward a rational diagnosis for children
with complex trauma histories." Psychiatric annals 35, no. 5 (2017): 401-408.
7 Johnson, Samantha, Victoria Strauss, Camilla Gilmore, Julia Jaekel, Neil Marlow, and Dieter Wolke.
"Learning disabilities among extremely preterm children without neurosensory impairment: Comorbidity,
neuropsychological profiles and scholastic outcomes." Early human development 103 (2016): 69-75.