Learning Disabilities
Did you ever wonder...
Why most children with dyslexia have difficulty with auditory processing, not reversing letters?
One in ten people you will live and work with will have a learning disability.
Why people with superior intelligence may still have dyslexia?
What it means to have reading and writing disabilities in a literate culture?
Why some students with learning disabilities have trouble interpreting facial expressions, lining up numbers in math, or starting a conversation?
What parts of the brain are used in efficient learning? Inefficient learning?
Why people solve problems in entirely different ways?
Interested in what part you could play? Read on
The undergraduate concentration in learning disabilities provides academic preparation for more advanced professional degree (MA in Learning Disabilities) or a research degree in Learning Disabilities or a related field (MA or PhD).
Also, students have come from and gone into fields as diverse as law, public health, medicine, and business.
The field of learning disabilities is concerned with learning processes and their dysfunction, including disorders of processing speed, attention, perception, memory, language/symbolic systems, and conceptualization. Inefficiencies in these basic processes can in turn lead to problems in listening, speaking, reading, writing, reasoning, and mathematics. Some definitions of learning disabilities also include nonverbal processes and stress the impact on social skills.
Students spend several years studying basic psychological, linguistic, and biologic bases of language and cognition. Advanced course work focuses more directly on basic processes that impair learning and lead to academic difficulties. There are opportunities to observe in variety of settings and to engage in a supervised clinical practica, teaching in the Northwestern University Learning Clinic housed on the Evanston campus.
Explore the faculty, research labs, courses, and clinics that make up The Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.
The LD program is coordinated by Anna Pistorio Wagner. If you would like more details, or to make an appointment, call 847-491-3184, or e-mail Mrs. Wagner at a-pistorio@northwestern.edu.
