Efficient and Inefficient Learner Strategies

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Many students with learning disabilities are inefficient, inactive, and disorganized learners. They don't know how to go about learning nor do they know how to figure out what the task demands. They seem to have little awareness that they are to put energy into learning. Their efforts are not sustained or organized, and they seem to be unaware that memory is possible or desirable. Typical problem-solving difficulties of students with LD include

1. They fail to use a systematic plan to approach a problem. When they play 20 questions, for example, they come up with disjointed, wild-guess questions rather than questions geared toward isolating categories.
2. They fail to distinguish critical elements from those that are irrelevant in a problem.
3. They don't make use of feedback to check their accuracy, so they will abandon a right answer or return to a wrong one.
4. They can't generate new inferences or make use of new data to revise their actions and plans.
5. They fail to draw specific conclusions and remain overly general.

Left to their own devices, students with LD are more dependent in their intellectual activities, don't work as hard, are more impulsive, and are less capable of understanding directions than are average achievers. They have no notion of strategies that might help them learn, such as studying difficult material more thoroughly than easy material. When studying, poor readers ask themselves fewer questions to help comprehension, take fewer notes, look for fewer main ideas, are less exhaustive in contemplating alternative ideas, and are less effective in elaborating on information in order to remember it better. It is common for these students to ignore the fact that they don't know the meaning of certain words and phrases, nor will they look them up.

In many cases, students with LD do not have serious deficits in their actual ability to learn. Rather, their inefficient learning strategies prevent them from using their basic abilities to their best advantage. They seem to have "performance deficits" rather than "ability deficits."

Often these students are helped when we use teaching methods to circumvent their inefficiencies, or we teach them better strategies. A classic study by Joseph Torgesen illustrates this point. Torgesen asked good and poor readers to push one button at a time to reveal each of seven pictures. The goal was to remember the pictures in order. As expected, poor readers had worse recall than good readers. But they also had little insight into a strategy to use for learning. Some didn't rehearse at all, others pushed the buttons in reverse order, and others rehearsed in random order. Good readers, on the other hand, systematically named the pictures and rehearsed in sequence from left to right. When Torgesen adapted the task by actually pushing the buttons in sequence for the poor readers, their recall became equal to that of good readers.

Torgesen next asked the children to memorize 24 cards belonging in 4 categories. Good readers were initially superior to poor readers. They more often named the cards and grouped them into categories, spent more time moving the cards around, and had less off-task behavior than did the poor readers. But when the poor readers were instructed to name the cards and actively sort them into categories, trained to look for categories, or to use mnemonic memory tricks, their off-task behavior dropped and their memory became equal to that of the good readers.

Because many youngsters with LD underachieve due to inappropriate, inactive, and inefficient learning strategies, we need to teach them more efficient ways to go about learning. Metacognitive strategies have been developed to teach these children more appropriate approaches to learning. These methods teach students to stop and think before responding, to verbalize and rehearse what they have seen, to monitor their attention and what they are to do, to visually image what they are to remember, to preplan task approaches, to use memory tricks, to reinforce their own appropriate behavior, and to organize their time. If you've ever taken a "how to succeed at college" minicourse, you'll recognize many of these points. When these students take a more systematic approach to their learning, achievement can improve dramatically and what were thought to be basic ability deficits may actually disappear.