LEARNING CHARACTERISTICS OF PERSONS WITH MENTAL RETARDATION

Persons with mental retardation viewed as inefficient learners.

Not very self educable.

Learning characteristics of MR have been well researched.

Learning-change in behavior due to experience and not due to maturation, growth, aging.

In planning educational experiences for MR must be careful not to assume that the MR child has learned things incidentally.

Performance levels are only partial indicators of the child's learning capacity.

Performance does not necessarily indicate person cannot do--instead failures only mean that they did not perform.

Previously talked about Developmental vs. Difference Models

*Developmental-formal cognitive processes are identical to those used by persons without MR--progress through stages of formal cognitive development and the upper stage of cognitive development achieved will be lower.

Zigler--1969--support for developmental model

*Difference or defective position--differences in cognitive development for MR are beyond rate and upper level of achievement.

Differences in IQ carry with them qualitative differences in the way information is processed.

Difference theorists--the greater the IQ differences--the greater the qualitative differences--but is a discontinuous relationship with IQ--below a certain level IQ some processes differ qualitatively--but above IQ cut off there are no qualitative differences (IQ 50).

Academic debate about mildly handicapped population.

Ellis-argued that difference can be either behavioral or physiological.

Research tends to separate groups of MR--IQ above 50 and IQ below 50.

MOTIVATIONAL VARIABLES

External locus of control.

How one perceives the consequences of one's own behavior

Internal locus of control--sees events (both positive and negative) as a result of their own actions

External locus of control--sees events (both positive and negative) controlled by outside forces, ie. fate, chance, other people

Young children have external locus of control--gradually shift to internal locus of control

External locus of control seen as more debilitating--blame outside forces for happenings or performing behaviors based on extrinsic reinforcement

Interferes with self reliance

Learned helplessness--Seligman

EXPECTANCY FOR FAILURE

Tasks are anticipated with the expectation for success or the expectation for failure--based on past experience

Persons with mental retardation have high expectancy for failure (Zigler research)

Those who have typically experienced failure learn to set low expectations for themselves to avoid additional failures

This becomes circular--expectaton of failure lowers the amount of effort put into a task, performance of the task is thus below what might be anticipated from the capabilities of the individual, and the expected failure becomes a reality

OUTERDIRECTEDNESS.

Another result of attempts to avoid failure

Instead of being self-reliant in problems, the outerdirected individual imitates the behavior of others or looks to other for cues or guidance

Learned to trust their own abilities--because they are always told what to do or are always corrected

Relying on external cues makes them dependent

WAYS TO FACILITATE MOTIVIATION

Need to be exposed to tasks in which they can succeed

Also need to deal with failure

Provide them with enough success so that they can learn to manage an occasional failure

Make expectations clearly known

Set specific realistic goals

Provide immediate feedback

Reward accomplishments

Because they do rely on external cues it is important to provide appropriate behavior models for children

LEARNING CHARACTERISTICS

Attention--

• Attention to the task is essential for learning
• Difficult for students with MR to attend to the meaningful dimension of the task.
• Learning curves differ for MR--the period of time from the initiation of trials to indication that they had begun to learn the discrimination was longer.
• Once the learning had occurred and the student is asked to repeat the task (second stage of learning) there was no difference.
• Cannot attend to as many of the dimensions simultaneously as those without MR.
• Performance needs a greater amount of time and practice before it improves--once it does rate is close to normal.
• Zeaman and House found that MR tend to fewer dimensions than non-retarded whereby brighter subjects more likely to attend to dimensions that have been critical to solving similar in the the past and to ignore those dimensions which are irrelevant.

Implications

1-teachers must present stimuli which vary in only a few dimensions

2-direct the child's attention to these dimensions

3-remove extraneous stimuli that may distract the child from attending to the task at hand

4-reward the child for attending to the task

5-use three dimensional objects

6-sequence tasks easy to hard

7-increase novelty of either positive or negative stimuli

8-avoid failure (Johnny-M&M's-positional prompt)

May appear to inattentive because of their outerdirectedness.

Input Organization

Once the individual has attended to a specific stimulus-must organize and store it--so they can recall it later-decoding the input.

Process of learning.

• a-arouse
• b-attend
• c-input-file into appropriate hold area
• d-hold-for permanent storage
• e-recall
• f-storage-put into permanent storage
• g-recall-retrieve from permanent file

MR are less efficient at step c--categorizing into chunks (Spitz, 1966)

Consequence--overload capacity quickly

Performance hampered by inefficient organization systems so no attempt to organize.

Help by providing learning strategies such as grouping, mediators, learning sets.

Strategies

1. Grouping or clustering material prior to presentation

a. spatially-present in different visual arrangements--Sptiz found that presenting sequence of digits visually, spatial grouping facilitates recall by MR (8 3 5 9 or 83 59)

-worksheet example-letters with tails in boxes

-this spatial grouping does not necessarily benefit persons without MR (actually interfered with their own strategies)--Sptiz found that it helped older MR but not younger

b. temporally-presenting material with a pause time

between items

c. perceptually-enclosing certain item in a shape or

configuration--worksheet--food groups

d. categorically-by content or commonality of items

color-shades of color??

function-cooking utensils

concepts-big, small,

Stephens conducted research on grouping based on physical similarity, function, concepts

He found that as child's MA increases--shifts from grouping on basic of physical similarity to grouping according to function.

This was also found true for non MR when equated on MA--suggest similar development

Spitz-1966 found that MR appear to use rote memory to recall lists as opposed to more systematic organization

Memory

Ability to retrieve information that has been stored

Well researched

Three stages of information processing relate to memory are input, storage, and retrieval--a problem with any of these leads to memory problems.

Short-term memory--data stored few second to a few hours is in short-term memory (telephone numbers, information for test)

Long-term memory--information recalled after a period of days or months or longer

Whether info is transferred from ST to LT depends on length of time in short term and extent to which information its into what is already in long term storage

People with mental retardation have as good long term memory as those without mental retardation

In short-term memory individuals have many problems

Mediators--non MR connect stimuli and responses by means of psychological processes that facilitate learning, retention or understanding

Mediators are the psychological activity that mediates between stimuli and responses

Verbal mediators more studied than visual mediators

Due to lack of ability to use rehearsal strategies

Verbal rehearsal (think about how we remember a phone

number we are trying to call or information we are learning

for a test)

Image rehearsal- teaching an individual to associate aspects of

a task with pictures of events that will help them recall it

Metacognition--problem solving, problem analysis, anticipating outcomes

Observational Learning

Remember that individuals with MR are outerdirected learners--took to others for cues and guidance

Observational learning includes imitation and modeling

These are used to develop new behaviors or to modify existing behaviors

Modeling can be used to facilitate each

Modeling effect--

behaviors serve as models (appropriate and inappropriate)

calling attention to appropriate behavior may be beneficial

reinforce behavior which they model after others

use audiovisual and real models

Language Behavior

poor academic performance and subaverage intellectual functioning heavily loaded with language factors.

MR have higher incidence in speech problems.

The also have more limited vocabularies, inadequate auditory discrimination, poor grammatical structure.

Language develops same way but at slower rate.

Differences are quantitative rather than qualitative.

Implications

MR are slower at mastering tasks

Differences appear to be quantitative rather than qualitative

When organizational strategies are provided MR tend to benefit

Inefficient use of Language--language while adequate for communication lacks awareness of deep structure--cocnepts less embellished, hierarchical strategies appear limited

MR not inclined to use verbal strategies to organize input or mediate responses.

Capable of improving performance in some strategies.

Academic Behavior

Reading----

IQ's

50-59 1st to 3rd grade reading level

60-69 2nd to 4th grade reading level

70-79 3rd to 7th grade level

Studies have suggested that they will read below MA expectancy. Others have shown that reading will be at or above MA expectancy.

Dunn--undertypical conditions rate of reading progress parallels that of growth in MA--three fourths that of typical child.

With intensive instruction reading age begins to exceed MA.

No definite conclusions on best method--some support for phonic method.

Arithmetic-----

Far less research.

In computation achieve close to their MA.

In reasoning significantly behind MA peers.

Teaching arithmetic by applying it to work situations made significant increase.