Metacognition for spelling in higher etudents with dyslexia: is there evidence for the dual burden hypothesis?

We examined whether academic and professional bachelor students with dyslexia are able to compensate for their spelling deficits with metacognitive experience. Previous research suggested that students with dyslexia may suffer from a dual burden. Not only do they perform worse on spelling but in addition they are not as fully aware of their difficulties as their peers without dyslexia. According to some authors, this is the result of a worse feeling of confidence, which can be considered as a form of metacognition (metacognitive experience). We tried to isolate this metacognitive experience by asking 100 students with dyslexia and 100 matched control students to rate their feeling of confidence in a word spelling task and a proofreading task. Next, we used Signal Detection Analysis to disentangle the effects of proficiency and criterion setting. We found that students with dyslexia showed lower proficiencies but not suboptimal response biases. They were as good at deciding when they could be confident or not as their peers without dyslexia. They just had more cases in which their spelling was wrong. We conclude that the feeling of confidence in our students with dyslexia is as good as in their peers without dyslexia. These findings go against the Dual Burden theory (Kruger & Dunning, 1999), which assumes that people with a skills problem suffer twice as a result of insufficiently developed metacognitive competence. As a result, there is no gain to be expected from extra training of this metacognitive experience in higher education students with dyslexia

Beyond spelling: the writing skills of higher education students with dyslexia

To have a clearer idea of the problems students with dyslexia may face during their studies, we compared writings of 100 students with dyslexia and 100 age matched control students in higher education. The aim of this study was to compare the writing of young adults with dyslexia and young adults without dyslexia. The study was carried out in Belgium with writers of Dutch. First, we studied the number and type of spelling errors, the quality of the texts produced, the use of words, and the handwriting, both in a précis writing task (writing a summary of an informative text) and in a dictation task (sentence writing). Our results showed medium to large effect sizes for spelling errors: d = .93 for morphosyntactic spelling errors, d = .55 for memory-related spelling errors, and a medium effect size for punctuation and capitalization errors, d = .40. Second, experts who were blind to the aims of the study were asked to judge the quality of the writing of both groups based on transcriptions that were free from spelling errors. The quality of the texts produced was judged lower for students with dyslexia than for the controls, d = .61 for text structure and d = .56 for agreeability, even though the number and types of words used by both groups were very much the same. There was no significant difference in the quality of the handwriting, d = .15. Given that remedial teaching has been shown to be effective for essay-writing skills, educational support along these lines may be helpful for students with dyslexia

Study strategies of first-year undergraduates with and without dyslexia and the effect of gender

For students to be successful in higher education, they need not only have motivation and sufficient intellectual ability, but also a wide range of study skills as well as the metacognitive ability to determine when a change in strategy is needed. We examined whether first-year undergraduates with dyslexia (N = 100) differ from peers without learning disabilities (N = 100) in the use of study strategies. The Learning and Study Strategies Inventory was used and potential gender differences were investigated. Matched for age, gender and field of study, fluid intelligence scores were comparable between groups. The self-reports showed that knowledge of test taking strategies was more limited in the dyslexic group. Also, 'fear of failure' was higher in the dyslexic students. Further analyses revealed group x gender interactions for motivation, time management and fear of failure, with female undergraduates outperforming their male counterparts. Implications for secondary education and university, as well as college student support services are discussed

Cognitive Profile of Students Who Enter Higher Education with an Indication of Dyslexia

For languages other than English there is a lack of empirical evidence about the cognitive profile of students entering higher education with a diagnosis of dyslexia. To obtain such evidence, we compared a group of 100 Dutch-speaking students diagnosed with dyslexia with a control group of 100 students without learning disabilities. Our study showed selective deficits in reading and writing (effect sizes for accuracy between d = 1 and d = 2), arithmetic (d≈1), and phonological processing (d>0.7). Except for spelling, these deficits were larger for speed related measures than for accuracy related measures. Students with dyslexia also performed slightly inferior on the KAIT tests of crystallized intelligence, due to the retrieval of verbal information from long-term memory. No significant differences were observed in the KAIT tests of fluid intelligence. The profile we obtained agrees with a recent meta-analysis of English findings suggesting that it generalizes to all alphabetic languages. Implications for special arrangements for students with dyslexia in higher education are outlined