Intellectual Disability Quiz: Understanding Characteristics and Mental Retardation

Questions and Answers

What is a characteristic of cognitive functioning in individuals with intellectual disabilities?

Poor memory

How do students with intellectual disabilities acquire new knowledge and skills?

At a rate well below their peers

What is a measure of learning rate in students with intellectual disabilities?

According to research, what type of instruction benefits students with intellectual disabilities?

Lively paced instruction Signup and view all the answers

Why do students with intellectual disabilities often need more practice trials than their peers?

Because they learn more slowly Signup and view all the answers

What is a challenge that students with intellectual disabilities face when generalizing what they have learned?

Difficulty applying what they learned to new situations Signup and view all the answers

What is a common difficulty experienced by students with intellectual disabilities?

Sustaining attention to learning tasks Signup and view all the answers

What is an example of a metacognitive strategy that can be taught to students with intellectual disabilities?

Rehearsing and organizing information Signup and view all the answers

What is a characteristic of Attention Efficient learners?

Attending to critical features of a task Signup and view all the answers

Why do students with intellectual disabilities often have difficulty transferring newly learned knowledge to new situations?

They have difficulty generalizing knowledge Signup and view all the answers

What is a result of repeated experiences of failure for some individuals with intellectual disabilities?

Learned helplessness Signup and view all the answers

What is a challenge in teaching students with intellectual disabilities?

Teaching them to generalize learned knowledge Signup and view all the answers

Study Notes

Cognitive Functioning and Learning

Individuals with intellectual disabilities exhibit slow learning rates, poor memory, attention problems, difficulty maintaining and generalizing what they have learned, and poor motivation.
Students with intellectual disabilities learn at a rate below that of their peers without disabilities.

Learning Rate

The rate at which individuals with intellectual disabilities acquire new knowledge and skills is slower compared to children without disabilities.
Trials to criterion, a measure of learning rate, shows that individuals with intellectual disabilities require more practice or instructional trials to learn new information.

Memory

Students with intellectual disabilities have difficulty remembering information due to problems with working memory and short-term memory.
The severity of cognitive impairment directly affects the extent of memory problems.
Teaching metacognitive or executive control strategies, such as rehearsing and organizing information, can help individuals with intellectual disabilities improve their memory.

Attention

Individuals with intellectual disabilities are slower to attend to critical features of a learning task and may focus on distracting irrelevant stimuli.
They often have difficulty sustaining attention to learning tasks, which compounds their learning difficulties.

Generalization and Maintenance

Students with intellectual disabilities often fail to transfer or generalize newly learned knowledge and skills to different settings or situations.
Developing strategies to promote generalization and maintenance of learning is an important area of research in special education.

Motivation

Some individuals with intellectual disabilities exhibit a lack of interest in learning or problem-solving tasks due to learned helplessness, where they expect failure regardless of their efforts.
This can lead to low expectations and a lack of effort in attempting to minimize failure.

Characteristics of Intellectual Disability and Mental Retardation