The effectiveness of strengthening working memory on attention, cognitive processing and emotion regulation strategies of children with special learning disorder

The present study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of strengthening working memory on attention, cognitive processing, and emotion regulation strategies of children with specific learning disorders. The research method was semi-experimental with a pre-test-post-test design and a control group. The statistical population included all students aged 9 to 12 who were referred to the Center for Special Learning Problems in the third district of Tabriz in the second half of 1400. The statistical sample consisted of 40 children who were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly replaced in two experimental and control groups. Data collection tools included the cognitive processing questionnaire (CPI) of Crouse (1999), the emotion regulation questionnaire (CERQ-K) of Garnefski et al (2012), and the attention questionnaire (JADDI) of Jordan (1992). In this research, the participants of the experimental group received the working memory strengthening program during 16 sessions of 50 minutes in eight weeks (two sessions per week). Data analysis was done using multivariate covariance analysis. The data analysis showed that by controlling the effect of the pre-test, there was a significant difference at the level of 0.01 between the average of the post-test attention, cognitive processing, and emotion regulation in the two experimental and control groups. According to these findings, it can be suggested that working memory strengthening intervention has been an effective treatment for improving attention, cognitive processing, and emotion regulation in children.