Learning disabilities are assumed to be caused by a variety of extrinsic and intrinsic factors. (a) Define intrinsic and extrinsic causes and give two examples of each type of presumed cause. (b) Discuss the relevance to your work as an educator of determining a cause for an individual student's learning disability

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answer:
(a) Extrinsic causes are those that result from factors in the environment, outside the person; examples include:
• Toxins such as lead poisoning
• Child abuse/ neglect
• Lack of early intellectual and language stimulation
• Inadequate or inappropriate instruction
• Infections
Intrinsic causes are those that result from factors within the learner; examples include:
• Genetic factors
• Brain injury
• Biochemical imbalances
• Brain differences

(b) In most cases we cannot infer a specific cause for the learning disability from the learner's performance or from a study of his/her educational history. Even in the occasional case when we are able to infer a cause, it rarely dictates any specific remedial or preventative actions. The primary difficulty with not being able to reliably pinpoint causes is that efforts at primary and secondary prevention are hindered. The most effective course of action is to evaluate a learner's current level of functioning in response to increasingly more intensive interventions and then to use that information to design alternative interventions to improve the functioning of the learner based on current functioning, not on presumed causes.