Learning disabilities are the neurological conditions of the brain that affect the ability of a person to perceive, process, store, or produce information ( Fletcher et al., 2018) . They show an area of weakness that makes the ability to learn difficulty. A learning disability represents the patterns of neurological dysfunction that make the visual-motor coordination a problem to the victim. Recent statistics show that this condition is on the rise as it affects about 4.6 million young adults in the United States alone ( Cortiella & Horowitz, 2014) ). This staggering number means that the people who are suffering lack competitive advantage when it comes to the world that demands literacy and numeracy. It makes them function at a disadvantaged level and thus causing them to have problems with society and personal life. The purpose of this paper is to describe the impacts of learning disability in the academic performance of an individual.
Literature Review
The human brain contains and carries out complex activities. Processing information is one of the duties that happens in the organ. A simple act like looking at a picture and registering it as it is requiring millions of neurons and chemical balances in the brain to relate the image to the other facts that are stored in the memories. At times, some of these reactions and processes fail to happen the way they should. The same thing happens with speech recognition and interpreting the words to create meaning that makes sense to us. These activities happen in different parts of the brain and it is up to the organ to link them up and create syntax. However, in some cases, the processing becomes difficult ( Cortiella & Horowitz, 2014) . The linking of these information becomes a problem and thus the person becomes diagnosed with learning difficulty.
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It is imperative to note that this condition does not mean that an individual has a lower level of intelligence. In fact, some of the most intelligent people that ever lived had a learning difficulty. They include Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Walt Disney, Alexander Graham Bell, and Winston Churchill, among others ( Cortiella & Horowitz, 2014) . This list carries some of the people with the highest IQs and whose contribution to the development of the world is evident till date. Despite this fact, there is a noticeable weakness that offsets their tremendous strengths. That is problems with memory, inability to read and write, and the difficulty in understanding visual or audio information ( Torgesen, 2018) .
The challenges arise not from the physical attributes of the ears or the eyes, but instead of the basic neurological condition of the brain. As we all have a unique set of patterns that imply strengths and weaknesses, we all have some subjects that we understand easily but there are others that need extra effort and external explanation to perceive and comprehend. An individual who has learning disability experience a disparity in his or her own level of ability. Such people are good at some things, but very poor at others. They also experience a tension between what they can achieve and what they cannot. In the end, they become frustrated in a system that requires fast perception and processing of information and which only rewards such.
Typically, the condition is linked to failing in some areas as a student. However, there is little knowledge on the exact way that learning disabilities in general lead to poor performance. Despite this, it is possible to single out certain disabilities and try to figure out how they can specifically impact the ability of a student to perceive and process information. As learning disabilities affect mostly the brain, it is essential to describe some of the psychological processes affected.
Psychological processes refer to a broad set of thinking skills that are used to perceive and process information. Learning disability affects five cognitive processes. To begin with, the condition interferes with perception ( Bethoney, 2016) . This is the ability to organize and comprehend data through the sensory channels. It is an important aspect of learning as it provides first sensory impressions on the things we hear and see. Students depend on perception to identify, relate, and discriminate information ( Siegel, 2018) .
The second process affected is the attention. This is a broad term that refers to the ability to perceive and process information. Most teachers of students with learning disabilities reports lack attention as the most notable disorders. They report that the individual is highly distractible. Memory is the third psychological process ( Siegel, 2018) . It involves different skills such as encoding and recall. Problems with memory may make it difficult to store new information and to retrieve previously processed ones.
Fourth, learning disability interferes with metacognition. This is the ability to observe and assess performance. It is the process that equips an individual with the keys to learning from experience ( Siegel, 2018) . It helps a person to apply what they have learned through generalizing information and strategies. Learning disability can have impacts on the ability of the student to perceive new information and use it in any situation ( Bethoney, 2016) . Lastly, the other psychological process affected is an organization, which is the underlying thread of the other four. Cognitive processes depend on the organization of the learned information. Lack of this can lead to the difficulty in organizing thought processes, as well as other superficial tasks.
With all that stated, it is important to look at how they affect the ability of learning and how they lead to poor performance. This is possible by looking at some of the manifestations of learning disability. Dyslexia is one of the disabilities manifested in school-going population. This disorder is characterized by the difficulty in reading despite the traditional learning process ( Torgesen, 2018) . In this case, the individual cannot attain the language skills of reading, writing and commensurately spelling words even with high intellectual capabilities ( Bethoney, 2016) . Such learners exhibit difficulty in interaction with the other learners through the resources of information. They become isolated and excluded from making the most out of the available media. They tend to avoid the material in the library as they cannot comprehend them. The impact of such a disorder can be devastating.
The student can feel detached, ashamed of themselves, feel inadequate. Ability to read is essential for success in any subject because it is the basis of conventional instruction ( Torgesen, 2018) . Successful reading is, in fact, the most significant basis of academic achievement in any subject. It comes with many skills that are classified into either word recognition or comprehension. The former is required to decode the printed letters and assign a sound to them while comprehension includes the skill required to understand the meaning of the words. Students with a learning disability have difficulty in in both types of skills. When a student cannot read, there is a high likelihood that they will drop out of school ( Torgesen, 2018) . They read slowly and become confused with words, have difficulty in sounding out letters, and if they can, they experience difficulty in combining them to form words. In the end, they become unable to follow directions needed to pass in examinations, which automatically affects their academic performance.
Specific language impairments tend to manifest themselves as making the student have problems with working memory, number recall, phonological memory, and automatic retrieval of subjects stored in the long-term memory ( Torgesen, 2018) . This makes the students with learning disabilities have significant difficulty in acquiring key skills or reading and writing. As a result, they become short of their working memory and central executive functions, thus making it difficult to cope with the daily requirements of educational achievement. Such disabilities may also tamper with the recall of numbers and shapes that is attributed to learning mathematical facts and procedures needed to solve arithmetic problems ( Siegel, 2018) . This means that the working memory is impaired, which is an association of specific learning disabilities. In addition, there is also a problem of the memory disorders interfering with the science learning and testing performance.
Hyper-distractibility is one of the core features of learning disabilities. This is the most common neurobehavioral disorder that is affecting the school-aged children with difficulty in learning ( Siegel, 2018) . It manifests in the form of the inability of the student to hold things in the short-term memory and disorganized planning skills and the inability to shift between to mental activities. The students with this condition are usually distracted and their attention captured by an overstimulating surrounding. For instance, when in a large classroom with objects, the individual may wander from doing the coursework and making interpretations of the objects in his or her environment and thus becoming inattentive in class. Attention is one of the key factors that enhance performance in academics ( Siegel, 2018) . Lack of this element makes the student to frequently forget or miss important information.
With attention deficit disorder, a student finds it difficult to focus on the important tasks and paying attention to critical instruction ( Bethoney, 2016) . Some studies have pointed out that people with attention deficit and hyper-distractibility lag in academic performance because they hate rehearsal of information and can only do so under strict and reinforced supervision. They tend to get off track and lost with ease, especially when added details. They lose track on long, repetitive tasks that demand to hold information in the mind. These can include the mental ability required in Mathematics, multiple phase procedures, and English composition ( Bethoney, 2016) . These students have memory problems including problems with the beginning of tasks, not finishing things, being absent-minded, and forgetting information easily. They often fail to give close attention to detail and thus do avoidable mistakes. When spoken to, they seem to not listen.
In conclusion, learning disabilities affect some important psychological processes that are essential in perceiving and processing of information. This paper has identified five of these. It is also seen that the manifestations of these disabilities have huge impacts on the ability of the students to learn and use the information. This leads to poor academic performance. It is therefore important to look for lasting solutions to this problem that affects millions of school going children and adults.
References
Cortiella, C., & Horowitz, S. H. (2014). The state of learning disabilities: Facts, trends and emerging issues. New York: National center for learning disabilities , 2-45.
Fletcher, J. M., Lyon, G. R., Fuchs, L. S., & Barnes, M. A. (2018). Learning disabilities: From identification to intervention : Guilford Publications.
Bethoney, A. (2016). Learning Disabilities and Academic Success: Perspectives , 8 (1), 1.
Siegel, L. S. (2018). Learning disabilities: The roads we have traveled and the path to the future. In Perspectives on learning disabilities (pp. 159-175): Routledge.
Torgesen, J. K. (2018). Phonologically based reading disabilities: Toward a coherent theory of one kind of learning disability: In Perspectives on learning disabilities (pp. 106-135): Routledge.
