Biomedical subjects

U Shafrir

Publications and source records attributed to U Shafrir.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1994

Subtypes of learning disabilities in adolescents and adults.

This study tested the hypothesis that a classification scheme developed for the subtyping of learning disabilities in children, when applied to a population of adolescents and adults, would result in subtyping into discrete and relatively homogeneous groups in terms of cognitive functioning and achievement. We compared three groups, arithmetic disability (AD), reading disability (RD), and reading and arithmetic disabilities (RAD), among themselves and with a comparison group with normal achievement (NA) on a variety of cognitive and achievement measures. The main findings were as follows: (a) Each of the groups differed significantly from the others on tests of reading, spelling, memory, and other cognitive measures; (b) both the RD and RAD groups showed a deficit in phonological processing, vocabulary, spelling, and STM; (c) the AD group performed similarly to the NA group on pseudoword reading and phonological processing, but did more poorly than the NA group on word reading and vocabulary; (d) on many tasks the RAD group performed more poorly than the other groups; and (e) the AD and RAD groups performed more poorly than the NA and RD groups on a visual-spatial task. This study demonstrated the validity of this classification scheme for the subtyping of learning disabilities in adolescents and adults.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1994

Preference for visual scanning strategies versus phonological rehearsal in university students with reading disabilities.

This study investigated strategic preferences for visual scanning versus phonological rehearsal for recognizing words, pronounceable letter strings, and symbol strings by university students with reading disabilities (RD). Forty-seven subjects participated in this study: 20 students with reading disabilities who reported current difficulties in reading, as well as problems in learning to read at an early age; 15 students with learning disabilities (LD) who reported current difficulties in learning in areas other than reading but did not recall difficulties in learning to read; and 12 nondisabled readers (NR). The main dependent measures were response latency on a matching task for words, nonwords, and symbol strings, and posttest verbal reports of strategies used. Results showed that (a) most subjects in the NR group consistently used a strategy of phonological rehearsal for both words and nonwords, whereas most subjects with RD consistently used a strategy of visual scanning for these tasks, and (b) the NR group responded significantly faster than did the RD and LD groups to all three types of stimuli. The results indicate differences between university students who have a reading disability and nondisabled readers in strategic preferences for processing phonological information, with a clear preference by the former for using visual scanning rather than phonological rehearsal in matching tasks of words and nonwords.

Adult↗

PubMed1990

Learning disability, inferential skills, and postfailure reflectivity.

Children with learning disabilities (LD) were compared with normally achieving children (NA) on two aspects of problem solving: inferential skills and response to errors in an academic content-free task. We tested 33 normally achieving children and 69 children with LD, aged 7 years 10 months to 16 years 4 months, on the PAR (PAttern Recognition) task, a computer-based, self-paced learning sequence. The children with LD were subtyped in two different ways: first, as children with only an arithmetic disability (AD), or with both arithmetic and word-recognition disabilities (AD/WRD); and second, as children with LD and attention deficit disorder (ADD), or LD without ADD. Results showed that on inferential skills, children with LD (without subtyping), children with AD/WRD, and children with LD with and without ADD scored significantly lower on the PAR task than children in the NA group. Also, an interaction was found between the NA and LD (without subtyping) groups and age, whereby children with LD improved their scores on PAR with age significantly more than normally achieving children. On attention to errors, children with both arithmetic and word-recognition disabilities scored significantly lower than children with only arithmetic disability or NA. It appears that the meta-cognitive skill of monitoring errors may be a major source of difficulty in problem solving for children with both arithmetic and word-recognition disabilities.

Achievement↗