Latent Learning Disabilities in the Classroom: Interpreting Children's Learning Styles Identified by Memory Recalls

Abstract

If a learning disability is not defined, it can be said that primary school children show the features of adaptable students within the learning atmosphere of the classroom. Most of the time, teachers think that they teach and their students learn easily. However, studies on children’s memory show that the learning process gets abstract when the number of stimulants in the learning environment increase. Children especially have difficulties when they use more than one sensory memory, like seeing, hearing and touching, at the same time and it gets harder to remember things they learned. In this study, it is aimed to investigate the learning profiles related to the visual, auditory, kinesthetic & tactile and combined (visual+auditory+kinesthetic) memories of primary school children and to define whether learning results related to the combined memory cause a learning disability in terms of remembering. According to the results of the study, it has come out that a considerable amount of children have difficulties while learning with the combined memory. However, their teachers and probably also their parents are not aware of this situation. This result makes teachers consider that they have to help their students out individually in the learning environment in order to make students’ learning easier.