Background: Children with disability in reading learning are weak in the process related to cognitive processing, which causes them to be weak in working memory. Meanwhile, working memory has been proposed as one of the powerful cognitive structures and one of the etiological factors in learning disabilities. According to this the present study was conducted with the aim of comparing the effectiveness of cognitive-motor rehabilitation and non-motor cognitive rehabilitation on the working memory of children with disability in reading learning.
Materials and Methods: It was a quasi-experimental study with pretest, posttest and control group design and a two-month follow-up period. The statistical population of the study included second- to fourth-grade children with reading learning disability in zone 6 of Tehran in academic year 2021-22. 56 children with reading disabilities were selected by purposive sampling and randomly replaced in two experimental groups and one control group. The children in the experimental groups received cognitive-motor rehabilitation and cognitive-non-motor rehabilitation separately in 12 sessions during 6 weeks. The applied instrument in this study included N-BACK software (Jaeggi, et.al. 2008) to measure working memory. The collected data were analyzed via SPSS23 software through mixed ANOVA and Bonferroni follow-up tests.
Results: The results showed that cognitive-motor rehabilitation and non-motor cognitive rehabilitation has significant effect on working memory of the children with reading learning disability. The results of the follow-up test also showed that there is no significant difference between the effectiveness of these two interventions.
Conclusion: According to the results of the present study it can be concluded that cognitive-motor rehabilitation and non-motor cognitive rehabilitation can be used an effective method to improve working memory and cognitive flexibility of the children with reading learning disability through influencing cortex and applying purposeful cognitive-motor exercises.