Neuropsychological significance of variations in patterns of academic performance: Verbal and visual-spatial abilities

Forty-five 9- to 14-year-old children with learning disabilities whose WISC Full Scale IQs fell within the 86-114 range were divided into 3 groups on the basis of their patterns of reading, spelling, and arith-metic achievement. Group 1 was composed of children who were uniformly deficient in reading, spelling, and arithmetic: children in Group 2 were relatively adept at arithmetic as compared to their perform-ance in reading and spelling: Group 3 was composed of children whose reading and spelling performances were average or above, but whose arithmetic performance was relatively deficient. The performances of these children were compared on 13 dependent measures, including tests for motor, psychomotor, and tactile-perceptual abilities. Group 3 was found to be generally deficient on the more complex, heterogeneous psychomotor measures and on a composite tactile-perceptual measure. The results are discussed with reference to (a) the neuropsychological abilities which may limit performance on calculation tasks, (b) problems with the exclusive use of the "level of performance " approach to the investigation of children with arithmetic disabilities, and (c) some remedial educational implica-tions of the differential patterns of abilities and deficits exhibited by such children. For many, the term "learning disability " is virtually synonymous with reading and/or spelling deficiencies. This i