Learning Skills Continuum Overview

What is the Learning Skills Continuum?

The Learning Skills continuum is a hierarchy of skills that follows natural human development beginning with movement and self-awareness; increasing to include awareness, understanding, and interaction with the world around us; and finally, higher level learning and self-management skills.

Why is it important?

Academic and social success depends upon a solid foundation of cognitive learning skills. If you think about these skills like a ladder or a continuum, academics and school subjects are at the very top. Many other skills must be in place in order to learn easily at the top of the ladder. When the underlying learning skills, or skills lower on the continuum are weak, they may keep children and adults from learning and functioning as well and as independently as they should. Compensating for weak underlying skills will divert attention and energy from the learning task.

What are “Underlying Learning Skills?

We all understand the top levels of the continuum because these are school skills: reading, spelling, writing, math, and other content areas. But what are the underlying skills that are needed to support comfortable, independent learning in the academic areas? From bottom up on the continuum, they are:

Core Learning Skills: These are foundational movement, visual, and auditory skills that help children develop a sense of self, internal organization, and body and attention awareness and control.

Processing Skills: These are skills such as attention, memory, auditory and visual processing (how we think about and understand things that we see or hear), processing speed, language comprehension, and phonemic awareness (the thinking process critical to reading that supports learning and using phonics).

Executive Function: This is our personal manager that guides and directs our attention and behavior. It helps us reason, problem solve, organize, and make decisions.

Attention and the Learning Skills Continuum

The most common symptom of struggles in school is poor attention, but there are many reasons why students struggle to pay attention in class and when doing homework that are not ADHD.

Poor attention in class may be a symptom, not the real problem. If a child has problems with any of the underlying learning skills, his attention system will also be stressed. While attention may become a problem in school or with homework, it may not actually be the real problem.

Dyslexia, Reading, and the Learning Skills Continuum

Learning to read easily, accurately, and fluently depends upon having a solid foundation of many underlying learning skills including:

• Auditory processing skills that allow you to think about the number, order, and identity of sounds inside of words (phonemic awareness)
• Visual processing skills that allow you to appropriately and accurately see and discriminate the letters, words, lines, and spaces on the page
• Auditory and visual working memory that allows you to remember all of the sounds and letters in the correct sequence
• Discrimination skills that allow you to tell the difference between letters and sounds that look or sound similar
• The ability to see patterns
• The ability to understand the words and sentences as you read

Weaknesses in any of these underlying skills can cause bright students of any age to struggle more than they should.

Learning Disabilities and Struggling Students

Whether a student has a diagnosed learning disability or minor struggles in school, the culprit is most often related to a weakness or inefficiency in one or more of the underlying learning skills. This causes students to have to work harder and longer than expected and often with a lesser result.

Correcting Learning Challenges and the Learning Skills Continuum

Dyslexia, learning disabilities, and struggles with attention or academics can chip away at a student’s self esteem and impact nearly every aspect of a child’s and their family’s life.  Smart, talented kids can decide that they are dumb. Older students and adults may find ways to cope with their challenges, but compensations are not comfortable or efficient, and often keep them from becoming as independent as they should be.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  Most learning and attention challenges can be dramatically improved or completely corrected by addressing the weak underlying processing/learning skills that are causing the problem and then remediating the basic academic skills.

The Learning Skills Continuum provides an understanding of the skills needed to learn and function optimally and becomes a guide in identifying and developing these skills so that students can become the truly independent and comfortable learners they have the potential to be.