The Role of Family Communication Patterns on Prediction of Meta-cognitive Skills of Students with Specific Learning Disorder

Students with specific learning disorder are students who have normal IQ but have difficulty in learning some skills such as speech, reading, spelling, writing, arithmetic, visual perception, auditory perception, visual sequence memory and hearing sequence memory. Children with specific learning disorders may have problems in one or more of the following: speech and language problems, difficulty in written, reading and arithmetic. An average of about 4 percent of school-age children have specific learning disorder. In general we can say on the one hand students with specific learning disorder, have poor metacognitive skills , which in turn are negatively affected the educational progress of the students. On the other hand metacognitive skills can be taught and the family has a decisive role in teaching them. Family communication patterns have an effect on metacognitive skills of children. For this reason the aim of present study was to predict the metacognitive skills (planning, rehearsal, control and monitoring, evaluation and organization) of students with specific learning disorders based on family communication patterns. The study employed a descriptive correlational design. The population of this research included the whole students with specific learning disorder in Shiraz-Iran during school year 2016-2017.  A total of 83 students with specific learning disorder were selected by convenience sampling. The Koerner and Fitzpatrick's family communication patterns questionnaire was administered to assess the family communication patterns and Hooman, Salehi, Kooshki and Arjmand's metacognitive skills questionnaire was administered to assess the metacognitive skills. Pearson correlation and simultaneous multiple regression analysis were applied to analyze the data. The results showed that there was significant and negative correlation between conversation orientation and planning skills (p<0.05). Also there was significant and positive correlation between conversation orientation and rehearsal skills, control skills, and monitoring and evaluation skills (p<0.01). Moreover, it was found that the orientation of conformity only have positive and significant correlation with organizational skills (p<0.01). Also, rehearsal skills, control skills, and monitoring and evaluation skills were shown to be predicted significantly and positively through conversation orientation (p<0.001), but planning was predicted significantly and negatively through conversation orientation (p<0.01). It was also found that conformity orientation is only able to predict organize skills significantly and positively (p<0.001). In addition, the results showed that the conversation orientation cannot predict organizational skills and conformity orientation cannot predict planning skills, control skills, and monitoring and evaluation skills. In terms of conformity was determined only organize skills was predicted positively and significantly based on conformity (p<0.01). According to the findings it can be concluded that the families of students with specific learning disorder have to provide free opportunities for their children with specific learning disorder and solve their problems and conflicts by conversation in many ways. And in a few cases through conformity orientation they can manage their children with specific learning disorder. In general, the findings of this study indicate that family communication patterns can predict metacognitive skills of students with specific learning disabilities.