The development of learning difficulties in children with Down's syndrome.
Down syndrome learning can move backward; build your program for re-teaching loops.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Wishart (1993) followed a small group of children with Down syndrome from birth to age eleven.
The team gave the same thinking tasks many times. They watched for gains, plateaus, and losses.
What they found
Skills did not just grow slowly. They slipped away after they had been learned.
Learning new things took extra steps and still looked shaky.
How this fits with other research
Onnivello et al. (2024) later saw the same slide in older kids. Standard scores dropped even when raw skills crept up.
Redquest et al. (2021) tracked speech for twenty-one months and found no natural improvement, matching the idea that learning stalls.
Iacono et al. (2010) moved the lens to adults. Only expressive language and short-term memory faded once Alzheimer status was removed.
Together the papers draw one line: Down syndrome learning is unstable across the life span, not just slower.
Why it matters
Expect backslides and plan for re-teaching. Use short booster loops instead of one long teaching block. Track age-equivalent scores to show families real gains even when standard scores fall.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add a weekly five-minute mastery check of last month’s targets and be ready to re-teach.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
This paper examines individual developmental profiles drawn from a series of longitudinal studies of cognitive development and problem-solving in children with Down's syndrome (DS) from birth to 11 years of age. These highlight the difficulties in explaining DS development in terms of a slowed-down version of normal development and illustrate how, from a very early age, developmental progress in DS is undermined by the children's failure to exercise and maintain existing skills and by their counter-productive approach to learning new skills. Developmental instability and inefficient learning were found to characterize performance on contingency detection tasks, on tests of object concept development, and on standardized intelligence tests. Implications of the findings for assessment, educational practice and developmental theory are discussed.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 1993 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.1993.tb00882.x