Jg. Wishart, THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEARNING-DIFFICULTIES IN CHILDREN WITH DOWNS-SYNDROME, JIDR. Journal of intellectual disability research, 37, 1993, pp. 389-403
This paper examines individual developmental profiles drawn from a ser
ies of longitudinal studies of cognitive development and problem-solvi
ng in children with Down's syndrome (DS) from birth to 11 years of age
. These highlight the difficulties in explaining DS development in ter
ms of a slowed-down version of normal development and illustrate how,
from a very early age, developmental progress in DS is undermined by t
he children's failure to exercise and maintain existing skills and by
their counter-productive approach to learning new skills. Developmenta
l instability and inefficient learning were found to characterize perf
ormance on contingency detection tasks, on tests of object concept dev
elopment, and on standardized intelligence tests. Implications of the
findings for assessment, educational practice and developmental theory
are discussed.