By definition children with mental retardation have substantial deficits in adaptive behavior. These limitations can take many forms and tend to occur across domains of functioning.
Limitations in self-care skills and social relationships as well as behavioral excesses are common characteristics of individuals with mental retardation.
Self Care and Daily Living Skills: Individuals with mental retardation who require extensive supports must often be taught basic self-care skills such as dressing, eating, and hygiene. Direct instruction and environmental supports such as added prompts and simplified routines are necessary to ensure that deficits in these adaptive areas do not come to seriously limit one’s quality of life.
Social Development: Making and sustaining friendships and personal relationships present significant challenges for many persons with mental retardation. Limited cognitive processing skills, poor language development, and unusual or inappropriate behaviors can seriously impede interacting with others.
Behavioral Excesses and Challenging Behavior: Students with mental retardation are more likely to exhibit behavior problems than are children without disabilities. Difficulties accepting criticism, limited self-control, and bizarre and inappropriate behaviors such as aggression or self-injury are often observed in children with mental retardation. Some of the genetic syndromes associated with mental retardation tend to include abnormal behavior
Positive Attributes: Descriptions of the intellectual functioning and adaptive behavior of individuals with mental retardation focus on limitations and deficits and paint a picture of a monolithic group of people whose most important characteristics revolve around the absence of desirable traits.
Showing posts with label MR Characteristics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MR Characteristics. Show all posts
Mental Retardation's Cognitive Functioning Levels
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.
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.
Levels of Mental Retardation
Levels of mental retardation:
Mild: master academic skills up to about the sixth-grade level and are able to learn job skills well enough to support themselves independently or semi-independently.
Moderate: significant delays in development during their preschool years. As they grow older, discrepancies in overall intellectual development and adaptive functioning generally grow wider between these children and age mates without disabilities. People with moderate mental retardation are more likely to have health and behavior problems than are individuals with mild retardation.
Severe: always identified at birth or shortly afterward. Most of these infants have significant central nervous system damage, and many have additional disabilities and/or health conditions.
Mild: master academic skills up to about the sixth-grade level and are able to learn job skills well enough to support themselves independently or semi-independently.
Moderate: significant delays in development during their preschool years. As they grow older, discrepancies in overall intellectual development and adaptive functioning generally grow wider between these children and age mates without disabilities. People with moderate mental retardation are more likely to have health and behavior problems than are individuals with mild retardation.
Severe: always identified at birth or shortly afterward. Most of these infants have significant central nervous system damage, and many have additional disabilities and/or health conditions.
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