Daniel P. Hallahan, University of Virginia, & Cecil D. Mercer, University of Florida
Learning Disabilities Summit: Building a Foundation for the Future White Papers
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From about 1960 to 1975, learning disabilities began its emergence as a formal category. It was during this period that (a) the term learning disabilities was introduced; (b) the federal government included learning disabilities on its agenda; (c) parents and professionals founded organizations for learning disabilities; and (d) educational programming for students with learning disabilities blossomed, with a particular focus on psychological processing and perceptual training. Introduction of the Term Learning Disabilities
Kirk's definition. Most authorities credit Samuel Kirk as the originator of the term learning disabilities. In the first edition of his Educating Exceptional Children, which became arguably the most widely used college introductory text for special education of its era, Kirk (1962) defined learning disabilities as follows:
A learning disability refers to a retardation, disorder, or delayed development in one or more of the processes of speech, language, reading, writing, arithmetic, or other school subject resulting from a psychological handicap caused by a possible cerebral dysfunction and/or emotional or behavioral disturbances. It is not the result of mental retardation, sensory deprivation, or cultural and instructional factors. (Kirk, 1962, p. 263)
Addressing a group of parents of "perceptually handicapped" children a year later, Kirk (1963) again used the term learning disabilities. Several of the parents at the conference had approached Kirk before he spoke, saying that they needed help in selecting a name for their proposed national organization (Kirk, 1976). Ironically, Kirk first talked of his distaste for labels but then proceeded to introduce a term that has become, by far, the most frequently used label in special education:
I have felt for some time that labels we give children are satisfying to us, but of little help to the child himself. We seem to be satisfied if we can give a technical name to a condition. This gives us the satisfaction of closure. We think we know the answers if we can give the child a name or a label--brain injured, schizophrenic, autistic, mentally retarded, aphasia, etc. As indicated before, the term "brain injury" has little meaning to us from a management or training point of view. It does not tell me if the child is smart or dull, hyperactive or underactive.... The terms cerebral palsy, brain injured, mentally retarded, aphasic, etc. are not actually classification terms. In a sense they are not diagnostic, if by diagnosis we mean an assessment of the child in such a way that leads us to some form of treatment, management, or remediation. In addition, it is not a basic cause since the designation of the child as brain injured does not really tell us why the child is brain injured or how he got that way.
Recently, I have used the term "learning disabilities" to describe a group of children who have disorders in development in language, speech, reading, and associated communication skills needed for social interaction. In this group, I do not include children who have sensory handicaps such as blindness or deafness, because we have methods of managing and training the deaf and the blind. I also exclude from this group children who have generalized mental retardation (Kirk, 1963).
Motivated by Kirk's speech, the parents immediately formed the Association for Children with Learning Disabilities (ACLD), now known as the Learning Disabilities Association of America (LDA), which is generally acknowledged as the largest and most influential learning disabilities parent organization in the United States.
Bateman's definition. In 1965 a student of Kirk's, Barbara Bateman, offered the following definition:
Children who have learning disorders are those who manifest an educationally significant discrepancy between their estimated potential and actual level of performance related to basic disorders in the learning process, which may or may not be accompanied by demonstrable central nervous system dysfunction, and which are not secondary to generalized mental retardation, educational or cultural deprivation, severe emotional disturbance, or sensory loss. (Bateman, 1965, p. 220)
Bateman's definition was historically significant because it reintroduced Monroe's earlier notion of using a discrepancy between achievement and potential as a way of formally identifying students with learning disabilities. Whereas the notion of a discrepancy went relatively unnoticed or unused during Monroe's time, discrepancy was to become intimately linked to identifying learning disabilities shortly after Bateman's emphasis on it. Federal Involvement
Task Force I and II definitions. By the early 1960s, the federal government began to take interest in developing a definition of learning disabilities. Several federal agencies8 and the Easter Seal Research Foundation cosponsored three task forces, the first two of which focused on definition. The title of the project, "Minimal Brain Dysfunction: National Project on Learning Disabilities in Children," reflected the division in the field at the time over the relevance and validity of attributing neurological causes to learning disabilities. This division was also evident in the definition that emanated from Task Force I, composed primarily of medical professionals, versus the definition developed by Task Force II, composed primarily of educators. Task Force I elected to define minimal brain dysfunction whereas Task Force II defined learning disabilities. The decision of Task Force II to provide an alternative definition to Task Force I is all the more significant in that Task Force I's charge was to come up with a definition whereas Task Force II was not charged with arriving at a definition. Instead, it was to focus on educational recommendations. However, it was the consensus of Task Force II that "because special educators in the field of learning disabilities must base educational management and teaching strategies on functional diagnostic information, a redefinition of this group of children for educational purposes was required" (Haring & Bateman, 1969, p. 2).
Task Force I defined minimal brain dysfunction as a disorder affecting
children of near average, average, or above average general intelligence with certain learning or behavior disabilities ranging from mild to severe, which are associated with deviations of function of the central nervous system. These deviations may manifest themselves by various combinations of impairment in perception, conceptualization, language, memory, and control of attention, impulse, or motor function....
These aberrations may arise from genetic variations, biochemical irregularities, perinatal brain insults or other illnesses or injuries sustained during the years which are critical for the development and maturation of the central nervous system, or from unknown causes. (Clements, 1966, pp. 9-10)
Task Force II could not agree on a single definition of learning disabilities. Instead, it put forward two definitions; the first stressed the notion of intra-individual differences included in Kirk's definition, the second stressed discrepancy between intelligence and achievement contained in Bateman's definition. The first definition held that
Children with learning disabilities are those (1) who have educationally significant discrepancies among their sensory-motor, perceptual, cognitive, academic, or related developmental levels which interfere with the performance of educational tasks; (2) who may or may not show demonstrable deviation in central nervous system functioning; and (3) whose disabilities are not secondary to general mental retardation, sensory deprivation, or serious emotional disturbance. (Haring & Bateman, 1969, pp. 2-3)
The second definition stated that
Children with learning disabilities are those (1) who manifest an educationally significant discrepancy between estimated academic potential and actual level of academic functioning as related to dyfunctioning [sic] in the learning process; (2) may or may not show demonstrable deviation in central nervous system functioning; and (3) whose disabilities are not secondary to general mental retardation, cultural, sensory and/or educational deprivation or environmentally produced serious emotional disturbance. (Haring & Bateman, 1969, p. 3)
National Advisory Committee on Handicapped Children (NACHC) definition. Toward the end of the 1960s, the U.S. Office of Education (USOE) formed a committee to issue a report on learning disabilities and to write a definition of learning disabilities that might be used as a basis for legislation for funding programs. The committee, chaired by Samuel Kirk, offered a definition similar to Kirk's 1962 definition:
Children with special (specific) learning disabilities exhibit a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using spoken and written language. These may be manifested in disorders of listening, thinking, talking, reading, writing, spelling or arithmetic. They include conditions which have been referred to as perceptual handicaps, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, developmental aphasia, etc. They do not include learning problems that are due primarily to visual, hearing or motor handicaps, to mental retardation, emotional disturbance, or to environmental disadvantage. (USOE, 1968, p. 34)
Legislation for learning disabilities. The original version of the Education of the Handicapped Act (EHA), passed in 1966, did not include learning disabilities as one of the categories of handicapping conditions eligible for special education assistance. Even though parents of children with learning disabilities advocated including their children in the law, they were outmaneuvered by parents of children with other, more traditional disabilities, who
convinced key Congressional staff persons that the definition of LD was so broad that it could include any economically disadvantaged child whose circumstances resulted in educational problems. They argued that such children, already assisted by the Congress through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, would use up all the resources needed by children who were, in fact, disabled. (Martin, 1987)
By 1969, advocates supporting legislation proposed by the Bureau for the Education of the Handicapped (BEH) were able to exert enough pressure to have legislation passed for learning disabilities--the Children with Specific Learning Disabilities Act of 1969. This act, which adopted the NACHC definition of learning disabilities, supported service programs for students with learning disabilities for the first time in the form of model projects. As part of the leverage to convince Congress of the need for funding for learning disabilities, advocates used the NACHC report, which stated that few of the estimated 1% to 3% of the school-age population with learning disabilities were receiving services.
In 1970, Public Law 91-230 consolidated into one act a number of previously separate federal grant programs related to the education of children with disabilities. Under this law Congress still did not recognize learning disabilities as a formal category eligible for support to local schools through Part B (Grants to States) of EHA. However, Part G of the law, the earlier law for Children with Specific Learning Disabilities, continued to provide authority to the USOE to award discretionary grants for learning disabilities to support teacher education, research, and model service delivery programs (Martin, 1987).
Two significant programs established by BEH under Part G were the Child Service Demonstration Projects (CSDPs) and the Leadership Training Institute in Learning Disabilities (LTI). From 1971 to 1973, 43 states set up CSDPs. The LTI, housed at the University of Arizona, prepared documents on broad topics related to service, research, and training in learning disabilities (Bryant, 1972; Bryant, Kass, & Wiederholt, 1972), and staff of the LTI provided consultant services to the CSPDs (Wiederholt, 1974). This program followed BEH's strategy for early childhood models and technical assistance (E. W. Martin, personal communication, January 16, 2001).
During the late 1950s, parents of children who would have qualified as learning disabled had there been such a category were starting to make inroads into having their children served. Parents were beginning to bend the ear of sympathetic and progressive educational administrators. Parent advocacy groups at the local and state level were starting to spring up around the country.
In April of 1963, several of these groups gathered together in Chicago for a conference entitled, "The Conference on Exploration into Problems of the Perceptually Handicapped Child." As noted earlier, Kirk addressed this group and introduced the term, learning disabilities. The following year, the Association for Children with Learning Disabilities was formally established.
In 1968, the first major professional organization dealing with learning disabilities, the Division for Children with Learning Disabilities (DCLD) of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) was founded. Its first president was Raymond Barsch.
The Emergent Period witnessed a proliferation of training programs specifically designed for children with learning disabilities. The vast majority of these educational approaches assumed that children with learning disabilities suffered from psychological processing and/or visual-perceptual processing deficits. We divide the educational programs into those focused on language disabilities and those focused on visual and visual-motor disabilities.
Language disabilities. During this period, Kirk's conceptualization of language disabilities, using the ITPA, had a major impact on the field. The development of the ITPA grew out of an earlier project of Kirk's focused on preschool children with mental retardation (Kirk, 1976). In 1949, Kirk began a study of the effects of early intervention on the development of children with mental retardation, setting up experimental and contrast classes in both an institutional and a community setting. The children were studied for 3 to 5 years, and the results were generally successful9 (Kirk, 1958). In directing the early intervention study, Kirk and his colleagues worked on coming up with diagnostic tests that would be useful for instruction. Because no measures were in existence, they began to develop tests to determine the individual perceptual, linguistic, and memory disabilities of the children.
Frustrated with these early attempts to build a diagnostic test of discrete abilities, Kirk enrolled in a course taught by Charles Osgood at the University of Illinois. Kirk and his colleagues eventually used Osgood's (1957) communication model as a basis for the first experimental edition of the ITPA (Kirk et al., 1961), with a revised edition published in 1968 (Kirk, McCarthy, & Kirk, 1968). The ITPA consisted of 12 subtests divided along three dimensions: (a) channels of communication, (b) psycholinguistic processes, and (c) levels of organization. Channels referred to the modalities (auditory-vocal or visual-motor) through which sensory information is received and then expressed. Psycholinguistic processes included reception, expression, and organization. Organization was the internal manipulation of information of concepts and linguistic skills. Levels of organization included the representational, dealing with symbolic behavior, and the automatic, dealing with habit chains. The 12 subtests were: visual reception, auditory reception, visual association, auditory association, verbal expression, motor expression, visual sequential memory, auditory sequential memory, visual closure, auditory closure, grammatic closure, and sound blending.
Depending on the particular profile that a child showed, a teacher was to concentrate remediation on various areas. Several authors came up with training activities for use with the ITPA (Bush & Giles, 1969; Karnes, 1968; Kirk & Kirk, 1971; Minskoff, Wiseman, & Minskoff, 1974).
Although use of the ITPA was widespread throughout the 1960s, by the 1970s it began to wane in popularity. Numerous critics of the ITPA surfaced (e.g., Engelmann, 1967; Hallahan & Cruickshank, 1973; Hammill & Larsen, 1974; Mann, 1971; Ysseldyke & Salvia, 1974). The criticism focused on the psychometric properties of the instrument as well as the efficacy of the training procedures.
Even though the ITPA fell out of favor,10 it was historically important for at least two reasons. First, it reinforced the notion that children with learning disabilities have intra-individual differences. Second, it underlined the concept of using assessment to guide instruction, sometimes called diagnostic-prescriptive teaching. Both of these ideas had been championed by Monroe (1932) earlier, but they did not gain widespread popularity until the extensive use of the ITPA.
While the ITPA was the dominant approach to language problems of children with learning disabilities in the 1960s, there were other language theorists who also garnered considerable support. Perhaps the most notable was Helmer Myklebust. Myklebust's original work was in the area of the deaf. However, he found that many children referred to his clinic had normal hearing acuity, but they exhibited poor auditory comprehension.
A driving force behind Myklebust's orientation was his belief that many children with learning disabilities, which he referred to as "psychoneurological learning disabilities," had problems in interneurosensory learning, the ability to combine information from two sensory modalities. For this reason, he eschewed Fernald's VAKT approach (Hallahan & Cruickshank, 1973).
Myklebust teamed with Doris Johnson to develop remedial techniques, primarily for receptive and expressive language problems (Johnson & Myklebust, 1967). Some of their suggestions for remediating receptive language problems were that: (a) training comprehension skills should come before training expressive skills, (b) whole words and sentences should be trained rather than nonsense words or isolated sounds, and (c) words sounding different should be taught before words that have sounds that are difficult to discriminate.
Johnson and Myklebust focused on two types of expressive language problems relevant to children with learning disabilities: reauditorization deficits, or problems in word retrieval, and syntax deficits. For reauditorization deficits they suggested such things as rapid naming drills using real words. For problems with syntax, rather than teaching grammatical rules, they provided "a series of sentences auditorially, sufficiently structured with experience so the child will retain and internalize various sentence plans" (Johnson & Myklebust, 1967, p. 137).
Visual and visual-motor disabilities. There was a proliferation of training programs developed in the 1960s for visual perceptual and/or visual-motor disabilities. The most notable figures promoting these programs were Newell Kephart, Marianne Frostig, Gerald Getman, Raymond Barsch, Glen Doman, and Carl Delacato.
Newall Kephart probably did the most to create an upsurge in interest in visual and visual-motor problems in children with learning disabilities. His major publication was The Slow Learner in the Classroom (Kephart, 1960, 1971), which contained his theoretical ideas as well as numerous perceptual-motor training exercises.
Influenced by his earlier tenure at the Wayne County Training School, Kephart came up with even more extensive theoretical conceptualizations and practical suggestions than had his mentors, Strauss, Werner, and Lehtinen. Kephart based his work heavily on the then-popular theories of visual perceptual development of Heinz Werner (1948, 1957), Harry Harlow (1951), and John and Eleanor Gibson (1955). For example, he relied on Werner's theory that perceptual development in children progresses from being undifferentiated to being broken down into parts to the integration and reformulation of the parts into a whole.
The most important aspect of Kephart's theory was what he referred to as the "perceptual-motor match," which he based largely on Brown and Campbell's (1948) servomechanistic model of perceptual development:
When the output pattern has been generated, it is sent down the efferent nerves...and response results. On the way,...a portion of the output pattern is...fed back into the system at the output end. The presence of feedback in the perceptual process makes the system a servomechanism. (p. 60)
The perceptual-motor match relied on two assumptions: (a) motor development precedes visual development, and (b) kinesthetic sensation resulting from motor movement provides feedback, which can be used for monitoring visual-motor activities. Based on these assumptions, especially the former, Kephart advocated that motor training precede visual perceptual training.
Another important aspect of Kephart's approach was his belief that laterality, the ability to discriminate the left from the right side of the body, is necessary in order for children to discriminate left from right out in space. He viewed children who had difficulties with reversals (e.g., problems discriminating b from d) as needing training in laterality.
Marianne Frostig, who founded the Marianne Frostig Center of Educational Therapy in Los Angeles, California, and was its executive director from 1947 to 1970, developed The Marianne Frostig Developmental Test of Visual Perception (Frostig, Lefever, & Whittlesey, 1964) as well as a commercial training program (Frostig & Horne, 1964). The paper-and-pencil test assessed (a) eye-motor coordination, (b) figure-ground visual perception, (c) form constancy, (d) position in space, and (e) spatial relations. The Frostig-Horne program had specific exercises for each of these areas.
Gerald Getman, an optometrist who had collaborated with the noted developmental psychologist Arnold Gesell at Yale University in the 1940s (e.g., Gesell, Ilg, Bullis, Getman, & Ilg, 1949), began offering summer training programs for practitioners in the 1950s on remediation of visual-motor disabilities in children.11 He and his colleagues published a manual of training activities for children with visual-perceptual and visual-motor problems (Getman, Kane, Halgren, & McKee, 1964). The activities focused on general coordination, balance, eye-hand coordination, eye movements, form perception, and visual memory.
Raymond Barsch12 developed what he called the "Movigenic Curriculum" (Barsch, 1967). One of Barsch's major theoretical assumptions was that efficient movement in the environment was necessary for survival. Thus, many of the 12 areas of his curriculum focused on movement: muscular strength, dynamic balance, body awareness, spatial awareness, tactual dynamics, kinesthesia, auditory dynamics, visual dynamics, bilaterality, rhythm, flexibility, and motor planning.
Glen Doman, a physical therapist, founded the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1955. He along with Carl Delacato, an educational psychologist, developed a controversial approach to treating children with brain injury.13 Their program of "neurological organization" was based on three assumptions: (a) the development of the individual, ontogeny, recapitulates the development of the species, phylogeny; (b) children with brain injury need to be trained to have cerebral dominance; and (c) training procedures need to change the brain itself, not just symptoms (Delacato, 1959, 1963, 1966).
The Doman-Delacato program enjoyed considerable popularity for a time, but it eventually met with overwhelming criticism from the field (Robbins & Glass, 1969). In 1968, a number of professional organizations14 issued a statement criticizing the Institutes on four major points: (a) the promotional methods placed parents in an awkward position if they decided against using the treatment; (b) the training regimens were very demanding, which might cause parents to neglect other family needs and restrict the child from engaging in age-appropriate normal activities; (c) the claims for success were not backed up by credible research; and (d) the theoretical foundation of the methods were questionable.
Although no official statements came out against the perceptual and perceptual-motor training programs of Kephart, Frostig, Getman, and Barsch, they were the topic of several research studies. Most of these studies found that, although these programs were sometimes effective in improving perceptual and/or perceptual-motor development, they were ineffective in improving academic performance (Cohen, 1969, 1970; Hammill & Larsen, 1974). Probably because of the ubiquitous research-to-practice gap in education, the use of perceptual and perceptual-motor training hung on for a period of time, but by the mid-1980s its use had waned considerably.
Funding for NRCLD is provided by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special
Education Programs. Award No. H324U010004. Opinions expressed herein are those of the National
Research Center on Learning Disabilities and do not necessarily represent the position of the U.S.
Department of Education.
© 2007 National Research Center on Learning Disabilities
Last Updated: November 19, 2007
Contact: nrcld@ku.edu