Deficits in cognitive functioning and learning styles characteristic of individuals with mental retardation include poor memory, slow learning rates, attention problems, difficulty generalizing what they have learned, and lack of motivation.
Memory: Student with MR have difficulty remembering things. The more severe the cognitive impairment, the greater the deficit in memory. MR student's also have trouble retaining information in short term memory.
Learning Rate: The rate at which individuals with mental retardation acquire new knowledge and skills is well below that of typically developing children.
Attention: Students with mental retardation often have trouble attending to relevant features of a learning task and instead may focus on distracting irrelevant stimuli.
Generalizing of Learning: Students with disabilities, especially those with mental retardation, often have trouble using their new knowledge and skills in settings or situations that differ from the context in which they first learned those skills. Such transfer or generalization of learning occurs without explicit programming for many children without disabilities but may not be evident in students with mental retardation without specific programming to facilitate it.
Motivation: Some individuals with mental retardation develop learned helplessness, a condition in which a person who has experienced repeated failure comes to expect failure regardless of his or her efforts. In an attempt to minimize or offset failure, the person may set extremely low expectations for himself and not appear to try very hard. When faced with a difficult task or problem, some individuals with mental retardation may quickly give up and turn to or wait for others to help them. Some acquire a problem-solving approach called outer-directedness, in which they seem to distrust their own responses to situations and rely on others for assistance and solutions.
