What is a learning disability?

Learning disabilities are disorders that keep people from understanding or using spoken or written language in typical ways. Learning disabilities are not due to physical handicaps, like blindness or deafness. Instead, they have to do with problems in the brain and the way it perceives things. About 10 percent of all children in the United States have some type of learning disability. The most common of these are dyslexia—where the brain has trouble understanding words, sometimes reversing the order of letters and words—and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is marked by difficulty with concentration. Special teaching methods have been developed to help such children learn successfully despite their disorders. The teaching is done either in the regular classroom, in special classes, or at a specialized school.