FAILURE TO FIND ATTENTION DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LEARNING DISABLED AND NORMAL CHILDREN ON CLASSROOM AND LABORATORY TASK

Clinical reports of learning disabled children (LDs) indicate that they are distractable and inattentive in the classroom and perform more poorly than Normals on measures of attention. In this study, attending behavior of LDs was contrasted with that of Normals in two settings, the laboratory and the classroom. The same subjects were studied in both settings. These environments permitted comparison of attending under highly controlled laboratory conditions as well as less structured classroom situations. Subjects were 17 LD and 32 Normal boys in grades 3, 5, and 6. The LDs were designated by the school district based on discrepency between IQ and actual academic achievement.;In the classroom, observational measures of ontask and offtask attending were obtained under three group sizes, two degrees of teacher involvement and a variety of subject matter topics. In addition, attending behavior of LDs in the regular classroom were compared with their own behavior in the special resource classroom. In the laboratory, a video display of a target letter with varying amounts of distraction were presented. Accuracy and latency of response to the target were measured.;Results of the classroom observations indicated that LDs were ontask to the same degree as Normals in academic and arts topics. LDs were more ontask (p < .001) in the special classroom than in the regular classroom. Attending was higher (p < .001) during teacher directed instruction than during independent seatwork, and in arts topics than in academic topics. Group size data available for LDs only revealed higher (p < .001) attending in small and medium groups than in large groups.;Results of the laboratory studies indicated that LDs were no different than Normals in speed or accuracy of response under conditions of distraction or no distraction. The lack of a significant interaction indicates that both groups were equally affected by distraction.;In general, data from this sample fail to support clinical observations that LDs are more distractable than Normals, and suggest that academic differences between these groups may not be attributable to attentional deficits in LDs.