Dr Kimberly Berens, a behaviour science educator and founder of Fit Learning, says it’s now common practice for children to be given a learning disability diagnosis when in reality they are struggling at school due to a cumulative skills deficit created by poor instructional approaches that compounds as they progress through year levels.
Berens believes it is akin to a crime that some 20 per cent of US children have now been branded with a learning disability.
“It’s largely mythological, the learning disabilities epidemic,” Berens tells EducationHQ.
“And now it’s a billion-dollar industry. People make a lot of money off testing kids, they make a lot of money off selling, to be honest with you – pseudo-scientific at best – treatments for these disabilities…”
Berens says it’s a ‘tragic outcome’ for so many children, and a situation that ensures the root of their learning problem never gets solved.
For instance, parents are being led to believe their child cannot read due to dyslexia – a disorder that has ‘never been directly observed or measured’, the expert contends.
“Learning disabilities are a construct … and what I mean by that is that they’re not directly observable or measurable.”
In the case of a dyslexia diagnosis, for example, Berens says the only thing that’s been directly observed or measured here is a child’s reading behaviours.
“If a kid reads poorly, it’s highly likely that’s related to ineffective reading instruction that is a function of their learning history, not because they have something wrong with their brains.
“Everything is based on behaviour, to be quite honest, but that has notoriously been ignored and almost considered to be an afterthought.”
Having clocked up some 30 years working in education and the science of learning, Berens knows only too well that her perspective makes her an outlier in mainstream circles.
“It’s a thankless job, but my number one greatest driver is creating powerful distinctions for the public, particularly parents, about how learning actually occurs from a scientific perspective,” she says.
“Because if you asked me what I think the number one blind spot for human beings is, it’s how learning happens and how human behaviour is actually established.”
Dr Kimberly Berens argues that school systems should be better held to account for providing effective instruction to all children, rather than have learning disability diagnoses mask their instructional deficiencies.
She laments that disciplines that seem “very noteworthy and respectable’, such as mainstream psychology and education, actually push out myths about learning that are based on theories or beliefs that are not directly measurable.
“When [a learning disability diagnosis] is used as an explanation for why [kids] can’t read or do math(s) or write … the public just so easily accepts these mythological constructs as explanations for behaviour patterns, of which there’s no evidence.”
Berens says she advises parents that if their child never struggled to learn anything before they started school, then it’s ‘scientifically invalid’ to suggest they have a learning disability.
“The notion that a kid has been learning just fine and met all their milestones normally … they learn from the natural environment, they learn from their parents enriching and interacting with them.
“Then suddenly, they begin school and they start struggling to learn academics.
“And if they struggle, to be honest with you, a majority of kids struggle to learn academics because schools don’t work.”
Less than one per cent of children in the US have true neurological learning impairments, Berens says, and these are ‘very clear’ from birth.
“Meaning that they actually, a lot of times ... their scores on reflex scales, at literally the time of birth, are not normal.
“They’re on the borderline or they’re below normal or they struggle to meet milestones.
“Some kids struggle to learn to nurse or take a bottle. They struggle with those reflexive skills.
“And then over time they also struggle with all those other milestones; learning to walk, learning to grasp objects, learning to play with them effectively, learning to talk, learning to have friends.
“Those things are all impacted for kids who have neurological learning impairments.”
According to Learning Disabilities Australia, it is estimated that approximately 4 per cent of Australian students have a learning disability.
Yet surveys have indicated that 10 to 16 per cent of students are perceived by their teachers to have learning difficulties and extra support needs, and particularly in literacy, the organisation notes.
Even though the field of modern psychology and mainstream education want parents to believe that learning to read or to do maths is vastly different to other learned skills, this is simply not the case, Berens argues.
“It’s scientifically invalid. Learning to read involves the same fundamental learning process as learning to walk and learning to talk and learning to play with objects. It’s the exact same process.
“The only difference is that schools aren’t designed effectively, and so kids don’t actually receive effective instruction and immediate reinforcement and immediate feedback and continual practice of the essential skills to actually master those repertoires.”
Berens says she’s infuriated that this is a problem that persists not just in the US, where close to 70 per cent of children are below proficiency across all academic subjects.
“This is a worldwide issue where, to be honest with you. There’s only a handful of countries that consistently perform at the highest levels of proficiency on the PISA.
“Most countries are producing pretty mediocre outcomes with their students, and this is because it’s a systemic problem where beliefs and traditions and myths dominate schools, and not what we know in the science of learning to be how learning actually happens.”
Berens argues that school systems should be better held to account for providing effective instruction to all children, rather than have learning disability diagnoses mask their instructional deficiencies.
“This is why schools never change, because [kids can be pushed off] into this group of learning disabled kids – even the pharmaceutical industry is in on it,” she contends.
Children are also being medicated for ‘attention problems’ even though they’ve never been taught how to pay attention, Berens flags.
“It’s really problematic…
"[But] I’m the controversial figure, especially in the United States … because what I’m saying is that a child’s learning history plays the primary role in how they perform in this moment.
“So in this moment, their performance is most greatly impacted by their learning history, not some biological or neurological problem they may have, and that makes me controversial, which is very interesting and kind of weird, if you ask me.”
This is the first in a series of articles canvassing Dr Beren’s insights on schools and learning.
