The effect of computerized cognitive rehabilitation on verbal skills of students with specific mathematical learning disorder

The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of computerized cognitive rehabilitation on verbal skills of students with specific mathematical learning disorder.

This is a quasi-experimental study with pre-test and post-test design with control group and a two-month follow-up. Among the fourth grade male students with specific mathematical learning disorder in Ahvaz, 40 people were selected by simple random sampling method and after matching with random replacement, they were divided into experimental (n=20) and control (n=20) groups. The subjects in the experimental group received the Captain's Log cognitive rehabilitation software Training Program (version 2018) individually through for 12 sessions of 50 to 60 minutes and the control group did not. To collect the research data, the Test of Language Development (TOLD) were used. The data were analyzed with multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) test using the 24th version of SPSS.

Computerized cognitive rehabilitation caused the test group's ability to improve in the post-test and follow-up stages compared to the control group, in the majority of verbal skills, including visual vocabulary, relational vocabulary, oral vocabulary, grammatical understanding, sentence imitation, grammatical completion, word discrimination and phonological analysis increased (p<0.05); However, no significant difference was observed between the word production ability of the experimental and control groups in the post-test and follow-up stages (p>0.05).

The results showed that computerized cognitive rehabilitation program can be used as an appropriate method for development of verbal skills among the students with specific mathematical learning disorder.