What is a Strategy?
Adults with learning disabilities require a number of skills and strategies to
help manage their disabilities in education, training and employment
situations. Through the initial assessment process, both the practitioner and
the learner should have gained a better understanding of the learner's
strengths and struggles. Based on this information and an ongoing assessment
process, three areas of assistance may be identified in the training plan:
"psychosocial, educational and technological." 6
Psychosocial assistance pertains to building self-esteem, motivation and
independence. Often adults' self-esteem may be low due to previous negative
experiences with school and possible ongoing struggles with employment.
Many adults may not understand why they struggle and they accept their
difficulties as a lack of "smarts".
Educational assistance refers to helping adults build their skills through the
development of strategies, appropriate instruction and/or accommodations.
Technological assistance pertains to the use of technology as an
accommodation -a tool for organizing and/or developing skills. Often
technology is used to help compensate for specific learning deficits.
This module will deal specifically with educational assistance through the
discovery of various skill-based strategies. Module 4 will focus on
psychosocial and technical assistance.
Definition
"Strategies are techniques that are used to help: understand and learn new
knowledge and/ or skills; integrate this new information with the information
we already know; and be able to recall the information/skill later, even in a
different situation. When we learn a new skill or gain new information, the
strategies include what we think about (cognitive aspect) and what we
physically do (the action we take)." 7
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