Comparison of the effectiveness of cognitive rehabilitation focused on phonological awareness and cognitive rehabilitation focused on working memory in improving symptoms of dyslexia in primary school students

Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disorders and deficiency in phonological awareness and working memory in its etiology have been emphasized and training the methods of improving phonological awareness and working memory has received the attention of therapist in the last decades. Therefore, the goal of this research was to compare the effectiveness of cognitive rehabilitation focused on phonological awareness and cognitive rehabilitation focused on working memory in improving symptoms of dyslexia in primary school students. For this purpose, a multivariate semi-experimental design with pre-test and post-test was used and 60 individuals were purposefully selected from the community of primary school students with dyslexia in Learning Disorders Centers of Urmia in the academic year of 2018-2019. Then, they were divided into two experimental groups. For one group, the cognitive rehabilitation focused on phonological awareness and for the other group the cognitive rehabilitation focused on working memory was done, each for 20 sessions of 30 minutes. Reading and dyslexia tests were used to measure the dependent variable. Data analysis using multivariate analysis of covariance showed that cognitive rehabilitation focused on working memory is more effective than cognitive rehabilitation focused on phonological awareness. Because working memory impairment is one of the main causes of reading disorder, training and strengthening of working memory can lead to improvement of symptoms of reading disorder.