Learning Detours

May 2007 Special Sections

From the time her son Luke was diagnosed with a mild form of cerebral palsy, Leslie Lundgren knew he would face more than his share of challenges in school. But early on, it seemed he would be able to use his sharp mind to overcome his physical disability.

“In kindergarten he was pretty on-task except for some fine-motor problems, and we expected that,” says Lundgren, who lives in Maple Grove with her husband, Rick, and Luke’s three younger siblings. “He knew his alphabet and could count when he was two-and-a-half. As inexperienced parents, we thought he was fine.”

But as Luke moved into first grade, his reading and math skills lagged behind those of his classmates, despite his clear intelligence. Tutors helped some, but Luke was still scraping by where he should have been excelling. When he was in the fourth grade, a referral by St. Paul-based Gillette Specialty Clinic led to a full neuropsychological evaluation at Fraser Child and Family Center in Minneapolis.

Those tests revealed that Luke had a nonverbal learning disability and also attention deficit disorder. When the Lundgrens heard the Fraser staff run down the symptoms of his nonverbal learning disability—excellent memory skills but trouble with reading and math, a great vocabulary hampered by sub-par abstract reasoning skills—one bell after another began to ring in their heads. “Over and over again,” recalls Lundgren, “we said, ‘Yep, that’s him.’”

Unanswered Questions
Learning disabilities have existed since humans first showed the capacity to learn, but it’s only relatively recently that their many layers and variations have been uncovered. Many of us are old enough to remember when kids with learning disabilities were simply classified as “slow.”

The latest figures from the Minnesota Department of Education estimate that between 3 and 3.5 percent of school-age children in Minnesota have a learning disability. Often, these disabilities are categorized by what they prevent children from doing: Dyscalculia inhibits the understanding of math concepts and symbols, and dysgraphia hampers the ability to form letters in writing. The most widely known learning disability—dyslexia—inhibits accurate and fluent word recognition, spelling, and decoding abilities. But in general, a learning disability is marked by a below-average ability to take in, store, organize, or express information—abilities most school-age kids can take for granted.

For the most part, the causes remain mysterious. Researchers have speculated that injuries before birth or in early childhood could lead to learning disabilities, that babies born prematurely are more prone, and that learning disabilities tend to run in families. Some research shows that boys are more likely to have learning disabilities. And it was once thought that because of the many structural eccentricities of the  language, learning disabilities were more common in English-speaking countries—new evidence suggests that’s not the case. With such a sketchy road map, much of the effort among doctors and educators has gone toward diagnosis and treatment.