Andrea Stevenson Crisp,
School Psychologist
Marcia Williams
Parent
Andrea Cronin
Special education resource teacher
Processing refers to how the brain takes in, uses,
learns, reasons, stores, retrieves, and expresses
information.
EVERYONE PROCESSES! Some individuals may have
more difficulty in one or more areas of
processing,
Since Public Law 94-142, federal legislation has
defined a learning disability as
“a disorder in one or more of the basic
psychological processes involved in
understanding or in using language, spoken or
written, that may manifest itself in an imperfect
ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or
to do mathematical calculations.”
Learning, gaining
knowledge and
procedures, depends on
the integration of many
processes in the human
brain.
Taking in selected
information through
one or more senses
(Visual and Auditory)
Manipulating that
information in
short-term or
working memory
Encoding the
information into
long-term storage
Retrieving the
information to
produce an
expression or
response.
Executive
Processing
Metacognition
Working memory
Attention
Auditory Processing
Visual Processing
Visual Motor
Processing
Expression
Response
Long-Term
Storage and
Retrieval
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Short term memory
Working memory
Long term retrieval and storage
milk
banana
Oak
hurricane
apple
refraction
ocean
blue
Buick
Maple
petulance
Dodge
mustard
wind
Chevrolet
hamburger
orange
kiwi
ubiquitous
onion
Pine
nurse
SHORT TERM
MEMORY requires
storage of
information for a
brief period of time.
WORKING MEMORY
is conscious
processing.
It involves
manipulation of
information.
1) uses information that is available in short term
memory or retrieves information from long-term
memory (or both)
2) performs some action on these two stores of
information
3) then stores the new product in long-term memory
or uses it to make a response.
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Working memory capacity is
limited.
Automaticity is the idea that
information can be processed
with little effort or attention.
So, a reader who has developed
decoding automaticity has more
working memory resources to
devote to reading
comprehension.
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The ability to store information in long-term
memory and fluently retrieve it later.
It’s the process of storing (encoding) and
retrieving information. It’s not necessarily the
knowledge that is stored in long-term memory,
but HOW the brain stores and retrieves that
information.
Some students have information in long-term
memory but have difficulty retrieving it. They can
recognize information and understand it, but
cannot express what they know.
Encoding Strategies:
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Frequent practice and repetition
Visual cues
Mnemonics
Connecting information to prior knowledge
Retrieval Strategies:
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Multiple choice
Color coding
Word bank
Visual cues
Working memory processes
information that is both
VISUAL and AUDITORY.
◦ Seeing differences
between things
◦ Remembering visual
details

Visual Processing
involves how well
your brain can use,
interpret, and
process visual
information.
◦ Filling in missing parts
in pictures
◦ Visualization and
imagination
◦ Spatial relations

Have difficulty seeing similarities and differences in
pictures, letters, numbers, words, and groups of objects.

Confuse left from right when presented with visual
materials

Have difficulty recognizing the same word when repeated
in a sentence or passage

Have difficulty remembering and sequencing visual
information (letters and numbers)

Have difficulty seeing spatial relationships and patterns.
Accommodations for
Visual Processing
Deficits

Visual-Motor
difficulties are
typically
associated with
difficulties with
writing and
hand/eye
coordination tasks

Have difficulty with hand-eye coordination
tasks (cutting with scissors, catching a ball)

Have difficulty forming letters when printing
or writing

Have difficulty copying from the board or
book

Have difficulty planning and placing a written
product on a page
Accommodations and
Strategies for VisualMotor Delays
 Auditory
Processing
involves how well a student
can understand and
process auditory
information that is
presented orally.
◦ Hearing differences between sounds/voices
◦ Remembering specific words or numbers
◦ Remember general sound patterns
◦ Understanding even when they miss some sounds
◦ Blending parts of words together
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Take longer to answer questions orally
Have difficulty remembering information
presented orally
Have difficulty listening to and
comprehending information given orally
Asks for oral questions and directions to be
repeated
Have difficulty following multi-step directions
presented orally

Students with
difficulties in
auditory processing
usually have the
most difficulty in
reading, writing,
and language
(understanding and
expressing).
Auditory discrimination
◦ The ability to recognize differences in phonemes
(sounds)
◦ Auditory memory:
The ability to store and recall information which was
given verbally..
Auditory sequencing: the ability to remember or
reconstruct the order of items in a list or the order
of sounds in a word.
Auditory blending: the process of putting together
phonemes to form words. (the individual phonemes
“c”, “a”, and “t” are blended to form the word “cat”).
 Accommodations
for
Auditory Processing
Difficulties
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Executive Processing oversees and manages
all other types of cognitive processing.
Executing Processing includes:
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Setting goals
Planning
Self-monitoring
Self-regulating
Solving problems
Adjusting
 Many
students with ADHD and
learning disabilities have
deficiencies in Executive
Processing.
Accommodations
for
Executive Processing
Difficulties

When an individual consciously uses executive
control processes, it is METACOGNITION.

 Making the decision to write down a grocery list because you
know you can’t remember everything, is metacognition.
 Knowing one’s processing strengths and weaknesses is very
important to metacognition.
 A reader with good metacognition will be aware of when they
come to a word they don’t know or doesn’t make sense.
Poor readers often don’t detect errors in the text and are
unaware that they are lacking comprehension as they read.
It’s critical that
students understand
how they learn and
what they need to do to
be successful.
If they have a disability,
teach them about their
disability and what it
means about how they
learn.