Impairments of hearing are quite common in adult/continuing education programs. We use the term "deaf" if someone cannot understand the spoken word through the ear alone, no matter how much amplification is used; the term "hard of hearing" applies if people can understand some things through the ear alone, with amplification. Hearing loss is much less frequent in K-12 or college classes. The way we traditionally have delivered education--a teacher lectures to a class of note takers--places these people at a disadvantage. It only takes one missed word, or a few, to alter the entire meaning of a sentence. (Consider, for example: "Character was central to Henry James's narrative technique" v. "Character wasn't central to Henry James's narrative technique.") For students with more severe hearing losses, particularly those that occurred early in life, a second, educationally significant, limitation is one of not having mastered the English language. When one is deaf or severely hard-of-hearing from early in life, learning language is extremely difficult.

ADD and ADHD differ from learning disabilities in that attention-related conditions render the student temporarily "unavailable for learning." In ADD, the student may appear to be day-dreaming for short periods of time; in ADHD, the student is so busy doing other things that he does not attend adequately to the learning task. (In learning disabilities, to articulate the distinction, the student is available for learning; in ADD and ADHD, much important information is simply not received, so it is not learned.)

Specific learning disabilities are conditions in which information is somehow "messed up" in the brain. People with specific learning disabilities hear what teachers say, and see what authors write, but by the time the data are perceived, or interpreted, in the brain, something happens. In dyslexia, printed letters and symbols may seem to turn upside down or even to float across the page. In other kinds of learning disabilities, words the teacher says are not understood with certainty. The student may ask himself, "Was that 'draw' I just heard? Or was it 'raw'? Or 'flaw'?" In yet other instances, students may not be able to separate "signal" from "field" (or, to use different terms, "figure" from "ground"); these individuals have difficulty isolating the information that is of educational interest from surrounding but largely irrelevant information.