Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1991

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Education

Major Professor

Laurence J. Coleman

Committee Members

Charles Hargis, Michael Hannum, Michael Johnson

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate children's ability to self-diagnose words in a computerized curriculum-based assessment system. Comparisons were made among children with teaming disabilities (LD) and their regular peers and between two self-diagnostic conditions: sight-words test and passage-reading test. Possible relationship between the children's working memory capacity and their self-diagnostic ability was also investigated. The findings indicate that the children with teaming disabilities can self-diagnose words quite accurately using such a system. The children with LD showed more heterogeneous self-diagnostic abilities than did the regular children. While the children with LD tended to over-estimate their self-diagnostic abilities, the regular children exhibited a "healthy skepticism effect" and under-estimated their abilities. Some relationship between the children's working memory capacity and their self-diagnostic ability was found. When the difficulty level of sight-words was at children's instructional level, the children with more efficient working memory self-diagnosed words better than did the children with less efficient working memory. On the other hand, no significant differences in self-diagnostic abilities among children were found when the difficulty level of sight-words was at their frustration level.

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