Abstract:

Learning disability is the most common reason for the integration of pupils in Slovakia. This partial weakening causes pupils' poor reading, writing and counting performance and, despite the compensatory mechanisms, causes also their poorer school achievement. The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of mental health problems on school achievement of pupils with learning disabilities and to compare their results with results of neurotypical pupils. Gender differences in mental health were examined in both groups of pupils as well. The study included 52 pupils with learning disabilities (27 boys and 25 girls) and 802 neurotypical pupils (404 boys and 398 girls). Mental health problems were evaluated by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire version for teacher (SDQ, Goodman, 1997), which assesses pupils in dimensions: emotional problems, conduct problems, hyperactivity / inattention, peer problems and prosocial behavior. In all dimension (except prosocial behaviour) the higher score associated with worse mental health problems. There were used t-tests for comparing means between groups of pupils and Pearson correlation coefficient to explore associations between dimensions of SDQ and school achievement. Pupils with learning disabilities achieved worse scores in all SDQ dimensions comparing to neurotypical pupils. School achievement significantly correlated with all SDQ dimensions in both groups of pupils and also the lower school achievement significantly correlated with poorer mental health of all pupils. No differences were found between boys and girls of neurotypical population in SDQ dimensions. Similarly, in boys with learning disabilities, low school performance correlated with worse score in almost all SDQ dimensions (except emotional symptoms), however, in girls with learning disabilities low overall school performance correlated only with higher scores in the hyperactivity / inattention dimension. Results of the research indicate differences between boys and girls with learning disabilities which lead to thinking about different models of mental health and coping with disability for each gender. A further research should focus on exploring variables which could be the reason of those differences, e. g. resilience or social support.

Keywords:

Mental health, pupils with learning disabilities, school success, school performance, gender differences.