Understanding Specific Learning Disorders in India: Challenges and Interventions

Description

Page: 275-279

Vidyut Singh Sheoran and Rukmani Radhaswami (School of Humanities and Education, Singhania University, Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan)

Academic performance is one of the strong predictors of successful future life. In many cases, poor academic performance leads to different physical, social, economic, and psychological issues in life. It is also observed that a person with poor academic performance may not be able to show his/her full potential in many situations of life. Hence it can be said that specific learning disorders are one of the major problems in many developing and underdeveloped countries. It is observed that 13% to 14% of Indian school-going children suffer from specific learning disorders and regrettably several schools have failed to pay attention to the problems of children having specific learning disabilities. There are approximately 90 million people in India with varying degrees of learning disorders and an average school class has 1 in every 5 children diagnosed with learning disorders. In India at the school level many times learning disorders go undetected because of the unawareness of teachers and lack of teacher training, especially about specific learning disorders and other neurodevelopment disorders. Children who are diagnosed with specific learning disorders are tagged as a burden to school and even labeled as dumb or lazy and are forced to leave the school by the authorities the parents are also reluctant to have their children tested because the educational assessments lead to nothing but only the children being tagged which ultimately is not a fruitful effort made by the parents. Now researchers are taking it seriously and are interested in research on assessment, intervention, and policy-making processes for children with Specific learning disabilities. In the present paper, the researcher attempted to highlight the research (both for assessment, prevalence intervention, and policy-making) conducted in the field of specific learning disorders in Indian settings.