Students with learning disabilities differ one from the other with regards to the affected area or field of learning, the severity of the disability, and the affect on didactic, social, and emotional functioning.
It's difficult to estimate the effect of a learning disability on a particular child since a child can have one disability or several disabilities in different areas of learning. The severity of the disability can be within a range from mild to severe. The time when the disability was first recognized, the accompanying treatment given to help the child, and personal factors pertaining to the child including his personality and his social/cultural environment in which he lives all determine the effect which the learning disability will have on the child and throughout his/her life. Therefore, children with learning disabilities are not a homogeneous group: There are those who have difficulty finishing elementary school and their learning disability will be a dominant factor throughout their lives, and there are others who finish their studies with advanced academic degrees in prestigious professions, and their learning disability is only a minor element in their lives.
Learning disabilities also change their characteristics with time and play a different role in different stages of development and learning. For example, some students' difficulty reading in the early years of schooling is many times discovered later on to be a problem in reading comprehension, and is a problem that affects many aspects of their lives. Other students with difficulty in reading can get by in most all situations and are only affected when forced to deal with long reading passages.
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