Learning and Down Syndrome - Part Three

One of the most often missed keys to overcoming obstacles to learning in children with Down syndrome (Ds) is the use of errorless learning. There was a period in Miss R’s life when I was looking for ways to lift her out of the preschool era. I call it an era because it seemed to go on forever! This key discovery, the errorless learning technique, lifted us beyond the preschool era into the elementary phase!

I would like to talk about errorless learning and the connection to motivation issues, how they impact each other and what we can do to create a more optimal learning environment for learners with Ds.

Motivation

Miss R is, like most children with Ds, extremely sensitive to failure. She hates to fail. Period. As an adolescent, she has better tools to meet failure with and works to persevere on most tasks but it hasn’t always been this easy.

I often questioned my contribution to this problem as we moved through the early learning years. As I looked back, even to infancy, there was little I could have done to prevent this sensitivity to failure. Let’s look for a moment at our infants/toddlers with Ds.

Even very young children with Ds meet many experiences with failure. Decreased muscle tone, common in children with Ds, results in ineffectual movement. Speech and language delays, along with articulation difficulties result in ineffectual attempts at communication. Did you know that self-evaluation of competence occurs in early stages of development before the child can express themselves verbally?

So, I guess it is really no surprise when we see our children develop strategies to avoid failure. Patricia Oelwein writes in her book, Teaching Reading to Children with Down Syndrome, (pp. 23 – 25 ) as to the lengths our children will go to avoid tasks that are too easy or too hard – from the misuse of social skills (taking advantage of the extra chromosome cuteness factor) to acting out behaviorally.

Given our children’s frequent exposure to failure they commonly have decreased motivation when learning new skills and concepts. Decreased motivation, along with inefficient learning processes (perhaps related to cognitive abilities and auditory processing difficulties) in children with Ds, contributes significantly to obstacles to learning in our children.

So what is a parent (especially a homeschooling parent) to do? In our experience, we began to look for ways to guarantee successful learning experiences which make for more efficient learning. How can we keep our children motivated? Give them positive, successful experiences! Success feeds motivation!


Errorless Learning

Errorless Learning offers our children success learning experiences without failure. It is defined as teaching new tasks by guiding the child through each step of learning a skill or concept correctly, not allowing them to fail. As the child becomes more capable, the prompt or cue can be reduced until it is not needed.

The key to errorless learning is errorless teaching. Errorless teaching uses the same language – a script - with each lesson and repeating the process several times (as long as it takes) following the same steps, in the same order, using the same words while using some sort of visual input (picture or possibly sign language) to incorporate what is most often our children with Ds learning strength.

Hopefully, this method will develop a strong base for higher levels of learning such as problem solving with a trial and error approach. One thing I have learned along this homeschooling journey is that allowing Miss R to make a mistake encouraged her to repeat the mistake and then incorporate the mistake or error into her knowledge base.

The most familiar errorless learning technique is the matching, selecting, & naming technique taught in Teaching Reading by Pat Oelwin. Children with Ds are guided throughout the process of learning new words without failure. Very successful and very exciting for the young reader!

Suggestions regarding the use of the strategy of errorless learning:

Be sure to have the child's attention...some children need training to attend.

Use language that is understood by the child. Develop a script to use when delivering lessons. Teach any unfamiliar language using errorless teaching/learning.

Target skills you want to teach. There are several developmental skills lists that will help decide what your child needs to know when. Take into consideration the child's interests.

It is important to break down even the basics into small steps. Teaching the plus sign for addition requires the teacher to name the sign and the child to match, select, then name it such. Children with short-term memory problems - where errorless learning is most needed - need practice at every step.

A key to learning for those children who have developmental delay, learning difficulties, attention problems, is to work only as long as it is fun and interesting. Once they reach a level of fatigue or boredom it is time to switch gears and move onto something else.

Always keep learning sessions positive. The parent or teacher’s attitude is extremely important. No matter how many times you have taught the lesson or what you mood is at the moment, keep the lesson positive and uplifting. Our attitudes are quite apparent to our children and impact learning....especially children with Ds. As you may know, they are very sensitive to our moods and feelings.

Sincere, appropriate praise is important to children.

Modeling is important to many skills....show the child how to complete the task. For example, hand washing has many steps and will need much practice for many of our children to complete independently. Sometimes physical support is necessary...hand over hand for skill development.

Don’t forget to fade the support, prompts and cues with success.

If you reach a point where the child is frustrated or unsuccessful, bring the lesson back to a successful place before ending the session.

Patience, patience, and more patience is needed for teaching our children with special needs. If I child does not appear to be getting it then often times it is not their fault...or the teachers! So many factors can impede the learning process...memory issues, processing issues. Sometimes their development is just not at the right place for learning a concept and can be returned to at a later date. I have been amazed when returning to a concept that I put aside for lack of progress only to find that somehow something clicked and Miss R has incorporated the concept!

Errorless learning can be used with very young learners to the more sophisticated of learners. It can be applied to most concrete learning. Some examples would be:

Learning colors
Learning letters
Learning letter sounds
Sight words
Math concepts
Learning numbers
Money Skills
Telling time
"Wh" questions

The list can go on & on....

One more thing before I end this post, I want to give you a simple example of teaching a concept using errorless learning. For example, when introducing shapes show the child a picture of a circle, use whatever script you develop to teach such as “This is a circle. A circle has no corners.” Present the same visual and script for as many times as necessary and soon the concept will be incorporated and you will hear your words repeated back to you! It is as simple as that!

Learning and Down Syndrome Part One and Part Two