Psychological theory and the study of learning disabilities

Psychological theories have long had a pronounced effect on the diagnosis and instruction of children with learning problems. Traditional theorists emphasized the centrality of gobal processes assumed to be common to most if not all cognitive tasks. These processes were quite distant from those involved in traditional academic activities, making it difficult to proceed from diagnosis to instruction the "leap to instruction" problem. In contrast, comtemporary theorists concentrate on identifying the specific knowledge and skills underlying performance in academically relevant fields such as reading, writing, math, and science. This trend toward domain specificity has made the task of diagnosis and remediation of school problems more tractable, as the processes thus identified are those needed for successful performance, thereby reducing the magnitude of the leap to instruction. At the same time, alternative methods of diagnosis, such as dynamic assessment, have been developed that supplement more traditional approaches by assessing domain-specific processes in action, rather than inferring their operation from the products of prior learning. These advances make.it easier to specify the processes that need to be the targets of instruction. Furthermore, current attempts to characterize optimal learning environments have fueled the development of a theory of instruction