Adults with Learning Disabilities: A Review of the Literature (original) (raw)

2002, Office of Educational Research and Improvement

An emerging theme in professional development for adult literacy program staff over the past decade has been the topic of learning disabilities (LD). As adult educators have come to recognize that the effects of LD can play a significant role in the performance and retention of adult learners, many have sought answers to the following Definition of Learning Disabilities In the years following the 1975 enactment of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, many special educators viewed LD as a developmental delay that would be outgrown as an individual matured. The field was too new at that time to benefit from longitudinal studies that followed students into adulthood. Similarly, the adult literacy field did not readily make connections between clients who seemed to have difficulty learning and existing research on the K-12 special education population. Some early articles (Bowren, 1981; Gold, 1981) questioned the incidence of LD among adult learners and debated appropriate practices for adults with LD. But adult literacy programs were for the most part not yet attending to LD in the design and delivery of services for learners or in staff development. problems that significantly affect their academic achievement and their lives. Prevalence of Learning Disabilities in Adults Literacy providers have questions about the prevalence of LD among adults and whether its prevalence in the general adult population is different from that in the population enrolled in adult literacy education. No one study has as yet determined a generally accepted prevalence rate among adults. Varying estimates for specific segments of the population do exist, but the estimates were obtained not through formal evaluation and documentation but through instructor observation, from administrators' educated guesses, and from client self-reports. For example, the U.S. Employment and Training Administration (1991) estimated the incidence of LD among Job Training and Partnership Act Title IIA recipients to be 15-23 percent. When Ryan and Price (1993) surveyed ABE directors nationwide about the prevalence of adults with LD in ABE classes, estimates ranged from 10 percent to more than 50 percent. Other estimates have been proposed for various subpopulations, but all lack validation data. A reasonable estimate of the prevalence rate among the general adult population can be extrapolated from data on the incidence of LD among school-age children. Data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 1998-99 school year indicates that 4.49 percent of the school population ages six to twenty-one have a primary diagnosis of specific learning disability (U.S. Department of Education, 2000). Many believe that this rate is an underrepresentation because operational definitions of LD vary from school system to school system. This may account for the discrepancy in the reported school-age identification rate and estimates derived from other sources. Research based on brain studies supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) indicates that 20 percent of school-age children may be considered reading disabled (Lyon, 1995; Shaywitz, Escobar, Shaywitz, Fletcher, & Makuch, 1992). Although not all children with reading disabilities have LD and not all children with LD have reading disabilities, the percentage of individuals with reading-related disabilities is higher than the standard school-based special education reports would lead us to believe. Given that recent studies point toward LD as a persistent, lifelong impairment, it is reasonable to accept a higher prevalence rate for the general adult population than is reported from special education data. For subsets of the general population, such as persons enrolled in adult literacy programs, we can assume a higher incidence rate (Reder, 1995). Although studies indicate that gender is not a determining factorequal numbers of males and females have learning disabilities-there is a gender bias in the identification of LD in school-age children, with four times as many boys as girls being so identified