Abstract:
An important area of educational study,“learning deficiency” faces a rather serious confusion of concepts. The key reason for this confusion lies in the fact that the Chinese concept of “learning deficiency” has four different educational and educational-psychological concepts in western counterpart: learning disabilities, learning difficulties, underachievement and low achievement. This primarily affects development of study in the area and guidance of its results to educational practice. To get rid of the confusion, the new relative term “underachievement” should be introduced to discriminate the absolute term “learning deficiency”. The introduction of the academic term “underachievement” is of significant theoretical and practical meaning, for it helps to better study learning deficiency in a relative sense on the one hand and on the other to attract due attention in making educational policy and educational practice.
