Learning difficulties in the first years of elementary education: why children don´t learn?

Abstract

In this article, we present the results of a research that had as its objective to systematize and analyze the data from the teachers’ evaluations, at the moment of the referrals of students  with indicatives of Learning Difficulties. The emphasis of this article lies on what the teachers understand of learning difficulties, in other words, on what they understand to be difficult and why children do not learn. We used as theoretical contributions the foundations of the Historical-Cultural Theory, because it is the one that best explains human development and especially how social relations mediate this process. Our research is based on a case of study of a group of public county schools, and in order to achieve our objectives, we conducted semi-structured interviews with nine elementary school teachers, on a qualitative approach. The results state that teachers do not have a concise definition of learning difficulties; they formulate descriptions of students' performance. Therefore, following this path, we essentially came to the conclusion that children do not present a learning difficulty, but they face it, as they are an active subject during the process.