Category Archives: Social Sciences

“strategy instruction: An important educational approach to working with students with a learning disability. It is based on an assumption that individuals with learning disabilities have significant deficits in the area of strategy development. These deficits may be the result of underlying language disabilities and skills deficits, or of problems in acquiring executive procedures and learning strategies.

In any case, a strategy instruction approach assumes that explicit instruction in learning strategies and executive procedures is a fundamental approach to helping students with learning disabilities achieve their potential.

Strategy instruction typically involves teaching procedures like SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review). Students learn to perform a sequence of specific activities geared toward a specific task and outcome, practice those procedures in a variety of contexts, and apply them independently.

Strategy instruction has proven effective, particularly in college situations where it allows students to meet course requirements independently.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

“perceptual-motor skills: In everything children do, the look, listen, and touch, and then make a perceptual judgment about the things they see, hear, and feel. It is this perceptual judgment that dictates the way they react to their world (what is seen, what is heard, what is felt). When perceptions are well developed, then reactions are more likely to be appropriate for each given situation.

Thre are six perceptual systems that take in information from the environment: visual (light), auditory (sound), tactile (touch), kinesthetic (muscle feeling). Olfactory (smell), and gustatory (taste). Perceptual-motor skills or behavior generally will involve perceptual input through more than one of these systems, and a complex sequence of motor activities.

Motor learning is an important part of childhood development. There is a natural developmental sequence of perceptual motor skill development, beginning very early with skills such as rolling over and sitting up, and proceeding to activities such as crawling, standing, walking, running, and jumping. As development progresses, the requirements for integration of perceptual systems and motor behavior grow more steadily subtle and complex.

Delays in the development of age-appropriate perceptual-motor skills may have significant and sometimes pervasive effects on school and social performance.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.