Listening comprehension and recall abilities in adolescents with language-learning disabilities and without disabilities for social studies lectures

Learning by listening to lectures is a challenge for college students with developmental language impairment

BACKGROUND

Increasing numbers of students with developmental language impairment (LI) are pursuing post-secondary education.

OBJECTIVE

To determine whether college students with LI find spoken lectures to be a challenging learning context.

METHOD

Study participants were college students, 34 with LI and 34 with normal language development (ND). Each took a baseline test of general topic knowledge, watched and listened to a 30min lecture, and took a posttest on specific information from the lecture. Forty additional college students served as control participants. They completed the tests that covered the lecture information without being exposed to the lectures.

RESULTS

With baseline performance controlled, students with LI performed more poorly than students with ND on multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank questions that tapped the lecture material. Nevertheless, students with LI out-performed the control participants whose scores were at floor. A self-rating of attention to the lecture predicted learning performance for both study groups; performance on a sentence repetition test, a measure that taps both prior linguistic knowledge and operations in short-term memory, was an additional predictor for participants with LI.

CONCLUSION

College students with LI learn less from listening to lectures than other students. Working memory deficits, especially those that reflect weaknesses in the central executive and the episodic buffer, may contribute to the problem.

Note-taking skills of middle school students with and without learning disabilities

For middle school students with learning disabilities (LD), one major component of learning in content area classes, such as science, involves listening to lectures and recording notes. Lecture learning and note-taking are critical skills for students to succeed in these classes. Despite the importance of note-taking skills, no research has been reported on the problems that school-age students with LD encounter when recording notes during science lectures. Using a sample size of 90 middle school students, the performance of students with LD was compared to students with no learning disabilities (NLD). Results found that students with LD performed significantly worse than students with NLD in terms of the type and amount of notes recorded and test performance.

Comparison of Language Skills of Adjudicated and Nonadjudicated Adolescent Males and Females

Purpose

This study attempted to determine whether there were any differences or similarities in the basic cognitive and language skills of 4 groups of adolescents: adjudicated (a judge’s decision to establish responsibility for a delinquent act) and nonadjudicated male and females.

Method

The 4 groups of adolescents were 18 adjudicated females, 18 nonadjudicated females, 14 adjudicated males, and 14 nonadjudicated males. They were evaluated using the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test (K–BIT; A. S. Kaufman & N. L. Kaufman, 1990) as a screener for intelligence and the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals—3 (CELF–3; E. Semel, E. Wiig, & W. Secord, 1995) as a screener for language skills.

Results

No gender differences were found between the groups for either the K–BIT or the CELF–3. All groups scored within normal limits on the K–BIT subtests, but lower on the vocabulary portion of the K–BIT compared to the matrices (nonverbal) portion. There were differences found between adjudicated and nonadjudicated groups on the CELF–3, with the adjudicated groups having lower scores.

Implications

As the majority of adjudicated adolescents had not been previously identified as having difficulties with language abilities, this population could benefit from early assessment. Also, children who are at risk for incarceration should be screened for possible language deficits that could contribute to the many difficulties experienced by adolescents.

Memory and selective learning in children with spina bifida-myelomeningocele and shunted hydrocephalus: a preliminary study

BACKGROUND

Selective learning is the ability to select items of relevance from among less important items. Limited evidence exists regarding the efficiency with which children with spina bifida-myelomeningocele and shunted hydrocephalus (SB/SH) are able to learn information. This report describes initial data related to components of learning and metacognitive skills in children with SB/SH.

METHODS

Twenty six children with SB/SH and 26 controls (age: 7-16 y) with average intelligence, and monolingual English-speaking backgrounds participated in the study. Exclusion criteria for the SB/SH group were: prior history of shunt infection, history of seizure or shunt malfunction within the previous three months, prior diagnoses of attention disorders and/or clinical depression. Children were presented lists of words with equal exemplars each of two distinct semantic categories (e.g. fruits, animals), and told to make as high a score as possible by learning the words. The value of the words was designated by category membership (e.g. animals = low value; fruits = high value). The total number of words learned across three learning trials was used to determine memory span. Selective learning efficiency (SLE) was computed as the efficiency with which items of greater value were selectively learned across three trials.

RESULTS

Children with SB/SH did worse than controls on memory span (P < 0.05). Although SLE was not significantly different between groups, when asked what strategy was used in the selective learning tasks, 65% of the SB/SH children said they tried to remember all words (inefficient strategy). In contrast, 85% of controls said they tried to remember the higher value words--the more efficient strategy.

CONCLUSION

Success in school is often dependent on the ability to recall important facts selectively and ignore less important information. Children with SB/SH in our study had a poor memory span and were unable to monitor and report an efficient and workable metacognitive strategy required to remember a list of words. Preliminary findings may begin to explain our previous clinical and research findings wherein children with SB/SH often focus on extraneous details, but demonstrate difficulty remembering the main gist of a story/event.

Verbal selective learning after traumatic brain injury in children

Selective learning (SL), the ability to select items to learn from among other items, engages cognitive control, which is purportedly mediated by the frontal cortex and its circuitry. Using incentive-based auditory word recall and expository discourse tasks, we studied the efficiency of SL in children ages 6 to 16 years who had sustained severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) at least 1 year earlier. We hypothesized that SL would be compromised by severe TBI. Results indicated that children with severe TBI performed significantly worse than age-matched typically developing children on word- and discourse-level measures of SL efficiency with no significant group differences in number of items recalled from auditory word lists or declarative facts. We conclude that severe TBI disrupts incentive-based cognitive control processes, possibly due to involvement of frontal neural networks.