A Comparative Study of the Personality Characteristics of Primary-school Students with Learning Disabilities and Their Nonlearning Disabled Peers

This study examined the personality characteristics of 180 boys and girls of ages 8, 9, and 10 with learning disabilities (LD) in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade in urban and rural primary schools of Andhrapradesh, India. The subjects were identified based on their scholastic achievement on a spelling dictation test, an oral reading test, a reading comprehension test and an arithmetic test developed specifically for the purpose, along with mental ability tests – Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices and Draw-A-Man. An adapted version of the Children’s Personality Questionnaire (CPQ) was administered to the subjects with LD and a comparison group of children without learning disabilities (NLD). Examination of scores obtained by LD and NLD subjects on the CPQ portrays the LD child as having problems in social and emotional adjustment. Further, the older LD children tended to show a more maladaptive behavioral disposition than the younger, and there was a significant gender effect among LD children. GITANJALI SHARMA, Ph.D., is a consulting psychologist, Chennai, India. Volume 27, Summer 2004 127 Children, the most precious asset of any nation, deserve the best care that mankind can offer. Opportunities must be provided to foster the fullest development of their potential. Recognition of individual differences in every aspect of human life has led to the development of various special education measures to address the needs of pupils with disabilities (e.g., visual, auditory, physical disabilities), but less emphasis has been placed on their scholastic achievement. In India, special education is mostly geared to assist individuals with disabilities in helping themselves with various day-to-day life activities. Despite enormous efforts on the part of the government to distinguish children with disabilities from their typically developing peers and provide them with special education, their educational outcomes, assessed mostly in terms of school achievement, are not encouraging. Scholastic attainment is not always directly and proportionately related to one’s potential. Even among children who do not have physical or mental disabilities, various noncognitive factors play a role in the process of learning. For example, grade retention and dropping out of school can have negative effects, and until such factors have been thoroughly addressed, it is highly ambitious to expect improved outcomes. In India, pupils in the elementary classes of schools in Andhrapradesh (one of the states in India) are not detained for academic failure. Thus, until the seventh grade, annual promotion is based merely on school attendance. As a result, children’s academic problems go mostly unnoticed or are ignored until the seventh grade. In later academic grades students are evaluated only on their academic performance, resulting in serious problems of grade retention and dropping out of school. It is not surprising, therefore, to find some of the pupils in the fifth grade performing at the secondor third-grade level. Consequently, as a first step in implementing an educational intervention program, it is necessary to identify the actual abilities of the pupil. Every classroom in this area has an alarming proportion of nonachieving students. An examination of the reasons for pupils’ lack of achievement reveals incidences of slow learning, learning disorders, learning difficulties, learning disabilities, and so on, which may go unnoticed in the name of low or underachievement, negligence, or poor student motivation. This situation reflects teachers’ unawareness of the cause of their pupils’ lack of performance and academic progress. Students may have normal intelligence but may have emotional disturbance, be socially or culturally disadvantaged, or have learning disabilities. These students must be given due recognition to overcome their disability. Many definitions of the term “learning disabilities” have appeared in the professional literature over the years. An examination of these definitions reveals the existence of two distinct approaches: the causeoriented and the effect-oriented. Those who look at learning disorders from the first perspective attempt to identify the source or etiology of observed behaviors. Those who take the second approach are primarily concerned with behaviors regardless of the underlying causes. Clinicians generally prefer the etiological description whereas school personnel favor terms associated with school learning abilities (Frierson & Barbe, 1967). According to the cause-oriented definition of Clements (1966), children with learning disabilities are also known as having “minimal brain dysfunction syndrome.” This refers to children of near-average, average, or above-average general intelligence with certain learning or behavioral disabilities, ranging from mild to severe, that are associated with a deviation in the functioning of the central nervous system. Such deviations may manifest themselves by various combinations of impairments in perception, conceptualization, language, memory, and control of attention, impulse, or motor function. On the other hand, the effect-oriented theorists stress educationally significant factors. For example, Bateman’s (1965) definition insists on the “principle of disparity” and disorders in the basic learning processes. In her view, children with specific learning disabilities manifest an educationally significant discrepancy between their estimated intellectual potential and actual level of performance stemming from basic disorders in the learning processes that may or may not be accompanied by demonstrable central nervous system dysfunction and that are not secondary to generalized mental retardation, educational and cultural deprivation, severe emotional disturbances, and sensory loss. Offering additional definitions, organizations such as the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), the American Psychological Association (APA), and the American Medical Association (AMA) base their definitions on the focus of their respective organizations. The continuing difficulty in coming to terms with a definition of learning disabilities was settled with the adoption of the definition of the National Advisory Committee on Handicapped Children (1968), which states that children with specific learning disabilities exhibit a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using spoken or written language. These may be manifested in disorders of listening, thinking, talking, reading, writing, spelling or arithmetic. They include conditions that have been referred to as perceptual handicaps, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, developmental aphasia, and so on. They do not include learning problems that are due primarily to visual, hearing, or motor handicaps, mental retardation, emotional disturbance or environmental deprivation. Children with learning disabilities may be found in nearly every classroom in India, including those serving the most advantaged urban and suburban areas. There are many children who do not do well in schools. They may have difficulty in learning, but not all have a true learning disability. Recognizing the students who do have learning disabilities is a challenging endeavor. To date, no major attention has been given to this dynamic field in India. The Indian educational system is plagued with the twin problems of pupils dropping out or being retained in the same grade without promotion, if they have poor academic performance. Little or no attempt is made on the part of educators to identify the causative factors of student dropouts and grade retention. Systematic efforts in this area would have brought to light a variety of factors that may be responsible for the phenomenal waste in man-years Learning Disability Quarterly 128 and national finances that a developing country like India can hardly afford. The National Policy on Education and Program of Action in 1986 prompted India to stress the need for equal opportunity for individuals with disabilities. As a result, instructional material was developed by Project Integrated Education (PIED) for students with disabilities. This was the first time that education for students with disabilities was recognized as a human resource activity rather than a mere welfare activity. However, learning disabilities were not included in the centrally sponsored plan for integrated education for students with disabilities. This reflects the extent to which learning disabilities are not recognized on an equal footing with other types of disabilities. This may be because of educators’ unawareness or underestimation of the magnitude of the problem. Perhaps a lack of approximate estimates of the incidence or prevalence of learning disabilities in schools is keeping educators in the dark. Regardless, the situation indicates an urgent need to initiate systematic nationwide efforts. Keeping in mind the very limited or negligible amount of research that is conducted in India in this area, a modest attempt was made in the present study to identify children with learning disabilities (LD) and compare their personality characteristics to those of their nonlearning disabled (NLD) counterparts. Objectives of the Study The study was guided by the following three objectives: • To examine the differences in the personality characteristics of children with learning disabilities (LD) and nonlearning disabled children (NLD). • To identify the differences in the personality characteristics related to gender (boys and girls) among children with LD. • To assess the differences in the personality characteristics of older and younger children with LD. METHODS Sample The sample was drawn in three stages. In the first stage, 25 schools were randomly selected from various urban and rural elementary schools in and around the four district headquarters of Rayalaseema (a regional zone of Andhrapradesh state in India). In the second stage, a group of 45 boys and 45 girls (15 boys and 15 girls from each class) were selected randomly from the attendance registers of third, fourth and fifth grade of each school selected. Thus, the general sample was comprised of 2,250 pupils (1,125 boys and 1,125 girls). In the third stage, the entire sample of students was subjected to psychological testing in order to identify the children with learning disabilities. Results indicated that out of the 2,250 subjects, 204 had learning disabilities. Further examination to determine the presence of minimal brain dysfunction reduced the number to 198. The children were also checked for any physical disabilities (visual, hearing and speech) with the help of trained medical practitioners. Students with such disabilities were excluded from the final sample. For ease of statistical analysis, a selective sample of 90 LD boys and 90 LD girls (30 LD subjects from each group) in grades 3, 4, and 5 were selected randomly for the experimental group. An equal number of pupils Volume 27, Summer 2004 129 Table 1 Sample Distribution of LD and NLD Subjects Grade/level Age Gender LD NLD