Counselling intervention: a panacea for ameliorating the effects of learning disabilities among secondary school students in Ibadan

Abstract

Many researchers have found out that problems encountered by students with learning disabilities be it in the academic areas, social relationships areas, vocational areas or transition to adulthood con ripple outward from the student with learning disabilities to family, friends and peers at school or work. Historically, deficits in academic areas such as reading, writing, listening; speaking and mathematics are the hallmarks of learning disabilities. Guidance counsellors are therefore, employed to utilize research-based interventions in order to diminish if not totally close the highly publicized performance gap between students with learning disabilities and their counterparts without learning disabilities. In this paper, counselling as an academic field is reviewed, and the effect of learning disabilities on secondary school students are highlighted. In addition, counselling interventions applied by guidance counsellors are discussed while recommendations for better counselling Services were suggested.