Project leader: Kartini Abd Ghani
Supervisors: Professor Susan Gathercole and Dr Tom Hartley
Many individuals now reach tertiary education despite having persisting specific learning difficulties. Despite their personal successes in doing so, such individuals face considerable challenges in meeting the many demands of study at advanced levels.
The aim of this project, which forms the basis of the PhD studies of Kartini Abd Ghani, is to provide a systematic investigation of the cognitive skills and study skills of young adult students who have been diagnosed with specific learning difficulties. Of particular interest is how the profiles of working memory skills of these individuals correspond with the study skills strategies that they have been able to apply both successfully and unsuccessfully.
A number of different concurrent tasks were compared in order to identify the contribution of distinct components of working memory to task performance. Backward counting, an activity known to disrupt the central executive, led to large deficits in both repeating and performing the action sequences. The contribution of phonological loop varied both with recall type and task environment.
A first study has investigated working memory skills and self-reported learning strategies of university students with and without dyslexia. The group with dyslexia were found performed to have particular problems in tasks involving verbal working memory. They also less confidence in selecting main ideas, developing test-taking strategies, and managing anxiety. Strengths in verbal working memory was associated linked with greater reported use of anxiety management, test taking and selecting main ideas strategies.
The next step in this research is to extend this approach to investigate memory and study skills in older secondary school children with a range of different learning difficulties.
