Case studies

The following three case studies are fictional, but have been developed from an extensive review of learning disabilities research and collections of case studies gathered from Canadian, American and international sources.

Case study A - Tom

Information gathered during initial meeting

• Male, age 29, resides on his own.
• Divorced 4 years ago and has one son age 8 with whom he spends every third weekend.
• Attended high school until he was 16 but left due to poor attendance, lack of interest and failing grades.
• Worked in a beer manufacturing plant for 13 years and recently lost his job due to plant closure - he was making good money and is bitter about the plant closure.
• Over the past 6 months he has tried to get a "good paying job" at the local factories but they won't look at him since he doesn't have his Grade 12 diploma
• Tom often mentioned that it is the "company's" fault that he is in this situation.

Tom came to the learning centre to get high school upgrading. After three months he was close to dropping out because he was continually failing his written assignments. However, Tom's English teacher convinced him to give it another chance and referred him to the "literacy program" in the learning centre.

Assessment results

Expressive writing:

• Tom had frequent and some inconsistent spelling errors.
• He tended to add or miss parts of multi-syllabic words.
• Tom had spelling problems with suffixes and prefixes.