Learning Disabled Children as Adolescents

Parents of adolescents who had been diagnosed as learning disabled five years previously and parents of non-learning disabled subjects completed a questionnaire in which they were required to rate their children on 30 bipolar adjectives. These adjectives tested the parents' perceptions of their children in the areas of academic and learning orientation, self--satisfaction, delinquency, flexibility, sociability, social skills, dependency, impulsivity/social ease and television watching. The two groups were differentiated from each other in the areas of self--satisfaction, delinquency, flexibility, sociability and social skills. Learning disabled subjects were rated more toward the negative pole of the bipolar adjectives in each of these five areas. The scores of the learning disabled subjects whose performance IQ score on the WISC or WISC--R was greater than their verbal IQ score were compared to the remaining LD subjects. The ratings of the former group of LD subjects were different from those of the latter group in the area of academic and learning orientation, with the former group scoring more in the negative direction.