A processing disorder that causes students to have a problem listening, thinking, speaking, reading, writing, or doing arithmetic. A learning disability is not primarily due to the physical, mental, or emotional disability to environmental, cultural or economic factors.
As currently defined in IDEA, the term refers to 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, including conditions such as perceptual disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia. The term does not include learning problems that are primarily the result of visual, hearing, or motor disabilities, of mental retardation, of emotional disturbance, or of environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage (IDEA).
Students that have various processing disorders presumed to be intrinsic to an individual (e.g., acquisition, organization, retrieval, or expressions of information). For the purpose of special education services, school-age students classified as learning disabled are those who, after receiving instructional intervention in the regular education setting, have a substantial discrepancy between ability and achievement.