Understanding Learning and Related Disabilities

Children with developmental disabilities inhabit a gray zone: they live and learn under normal conditions in some aspects of their lives, while their "inconvenient brains" present a range of challenges in other school and life contexts. Dr. Martha Bridge Denckla provides parents and educators with general knowledge, research findings, and practical recommendations about a variety of these developmental conditions, including dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, problems with motor coordination, and executive dysfunction. Inspired by her efforts to explain these conditions to parents over 45 years of clinical practice, she provides a science-based understanding of the issues in an accessible format. She uses the science of cognitive and behavioral neurology to help readers understand how the interrelationships of brain, environment, and behavior produce these developmental disorders, and to provide a basis for parenting and education programs based upon understanding how variations in brain development should guide plans for what is taught when to whom. Such developmentally appropriate, evidence-based, differentiated instruction within general education can diminish the demand for separate special education, and will thus serve all kinds of brains, whether "typical" or "inconvenient."

Martha Bridge Denckla, M.D., is an honors graduate of Harvard Medical School who trained in Cognitive/Behavioral Neurology with Norman Geschwind. She has worked in hospitals affiliated with Columbia and Harvard Universities before the longest span of her career at the Kennedy Krieger Institute/Johns Hopkins. For half a century she has devoted clinical and research efforts to developmental learning disabilities and related school problems, contributing to more than 200 publications. Dr. Denckla has taught educators as well as those with neurological backgrounds.

1. Introduction; 2. Brain Development Relevant to "Inconveniences"; 3. Promoters and Enhancers of Learning and Development; 4. Specific Language Impairments; 5. Motor Coordination Factors Contributing to School Problems; 6. Executive Function; 7. Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD); 8. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); 9. Dyslexia; 10. Math and Miscellaneous Learning Disabilities; 11. Neuromythology; 12. An Inconvenient Brain in the Context of Changes in Educational Environments