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

Onderzoek naar de woordenschat bij Vlaamse en Nederlandse kinderen door middel van de Jeugdwoordentest (Ugent)

De woordenschatontwikkeling van 361 Nederlandse en 92 Vlaamse kinderen tussen 7 en 14 jaar werd bestudeerd door middel van een vrij en online beschikbare lexicale decisietaak ontwikkeld Brysbaert et al. (2014). De Nederlandse kinderen scoorden algemeen iets beter op de test dan de Vlaamse kinderen. Zowel in de Nederlandse als Vlaamse steekproef zien we dat de woordenschat sterk toeneemt tussen de leeftijd van 7 en 13 jaar. Er werd geen significant verschil gevonden tussen jongens en meisjes. Ruw geschat kenden de meeste kinderen een vierde van het vocabularium dat gekend is op volwassen leeftijd. Aangezien deze test op een paar minuten een betrouwbare schatting krijgt van de woordenschatgrootte van een kind oplevert, zijn de praktische toepassingen legio

Ik eet, ik eet wat jij niet eet:Ambulante gedragstherapeutische behandeling van een normaalbegaafde jongen met autisme en pica

Research on pica focuses strongly on individuals with intellectual disabilities. Most studies have small sample sizes and are run in institutional settings. Only in a minority of the studies, the functions of the aberrant eating behavior are thoroughly investigated. However, we assume that pica is present in a larger group of individuals, who may also have average intelligence. Pica is not only the consequence of automatic reinforcement but can also arise and persist as a result of operant learning processes. This particular case study broadens the actual evidence about pica and argues for the need of more flexible treatment protocols targeting individuals with normal intelligence in private and ambulant settings. We recommend a more systematic screening of pica in children and adolescents with a (suspicion of a) developmental disorder. <br/