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Are learning disabled children more impulsive?: A comparison of learning disabled and normal‐achieving children on Kagan's matching familiar figures test
Author(s) -
Nagle Richard J.,
Thwaite Ben C.
Publication year - 1979
Publication title -
psychology in the schools
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.738
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 1520-6807
pISSN - 0033-3085
DOI - 10.1002/1520-6807(197907)16:3<351::aid-pits2310160306>3.0.co;2-n
Subject(s) - psychology , impulsivity , learning disability , learning disabled , developmental psychology , cognition , cognitive style , test (biology) , matching (statistics) , latency (audio) , audiology , statistics , psychiatry , medicine , paleontology , mathematics , biology , electrical engineering , engineering
The study compared the performance of 100 learning disabled and 100 normal‐achieving third‐ and fourth‐grade children on Kagan's Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFF) to determine group differences along the impulsivity‐reflection dimension. No significant group differences were found on MFF response latency scores; however, children in the learning disabled group made significantly more errors than did the normal achievement group on the MFF. A double‐median split procedure for the MFF response latency and error scores of the total sample of 200 children was performed to classify the children by cognitive style along the impulsivity‐reflection dimension (i.e., impulsive, fast‐accurate, slow‐inaccurate, reflective). No significant group differences in the distribution and frequency of cognitive styles were noted. The overall results suggest that learning disabled children are not more impulsive but rather use poor strategic behavior in processing information. Implications for diagnosis and remediation are discussed.