Implicit Learning Characteristics Of Students With Learning Difficulties

In this study, to explore the implicit learning characteristics of learning difficulty students under two different implicit learning paradigms through comparing the differences of implicit learning between the learning difficulty students and top students and the correlation among the implicit learning and cognitive ability, academic achievement by the methods of measurement and experiment. Firstly, in order to study if the learning difficulty students have existence of implicit learning or implicit learning deficit under the two different implicit learning paradigms,Artificial Grammar Learning paradigm and Serial Reaction Time paradigm by comparing the differences of implicit learning between learning difficulty students and top students. Secondly, to investigate the relationship between implicit learning and explicit learning and to explore if the cognitive processes of implicit learning is separate or overlapping mechanism for further to study if the cognitive deficits characteristic of learning difficulty students influence implicit learning and provide the basis to improve learning difficulty students' explicit learning from the aspect of implicit learning. Finally, to explore whether the implicit learning can predict academic ability by analyzing the correlation among the implicit learning and cognitive ability, academic achievement. In addition, whether implicit learning has the independence of gender, age and IQ that are also discussed. The significance of this study is that implicit learning may be a great learning potential for learning difficulty students with the cognitive processing defects and the normal level of intelligence from the aspects of the definition and characteristics of implicit learning. Therefore, to compensate for the defects of the explicit learning of learning difficulty students by taking the advantage of implicit learning is in order to improve the explicit learning and academic performance of learning difficulty students meanwhile that is also providing an effective idea for assessment and educational intervention of learning difficulty students.The paper consists of six parts:introduction, literature review, questions and research design, experimentation, overall discussion and conclusions, limitation and prospect.The results have been showed as follows:1. The implicit learning of learning difficulty students is intact and no deficit under the two different implicit learning paradigm. Learning difficulty students have the best performance of implicit-explicit synergistic learning but explicit learning and implicit-explicit synergistic learning of learning difficulty students'performance are lower than top students under the Artificial Grammar Learning paradigm; Learning difficulty students also show the strong implicit characteristic under Serial Reaction Time paradigm.2. The implicit learning performance has no significant differences in the different difficult levels of learning materials under the two different implicit learning paradigm.3. For learning difficulty students, there is no significant correlation of implicit artificial grammar learning and cognitive ability,academic achievement,however implicit sequence learning has the negative significant correlation with processing speed and no significant correlation with academic achievement4. The experimental paradigm has no effect on the implicit learning but the minority just25.4%of students have the two implicit learning, the majority47.4%of students just have one of implicit artificial grammar learning and implicit sequence learning.5. There is certain synergic relationship between implicit learning and explicit learning which are not completely independent with each other.6. Implicit learning and cognitive ability have the certain predictive effect on the academic achievement. Morphological awareness, working memory and artificial grammar learning performance can jointly predict31.5%of the variance in Chinese Achievement. Morphological awareness, working memory and auditory attention can jointly predict51.9%of variation in Mathematics Achievement.7. Implicit artificial grammar learning and Implicit sequence learning of learning difficulty students are all independent of gender, age and IQ. The results of study has the following enlightenment for assessment and educational intervention in the field of learning difficulty research:1. The poor artificial grammar implicit-explicit synergic learning can be an effective indicator of assessment of learning difficulty which will help further to reveal the characteristics of implicit learning and enhance scientific feature and comprehensiveness for the identification of learning difficulty.2. The integrity characteristics of implicit artificial grammar learning and implicit sequence learning will become the potential learning ability for learning difficulty students and guide the future direction of the educational intervention. When learning difficulty students learn some complex rules, implicit learning is the basis process to achieve the explicit knowledge and also more sufficient time should be given to learning difficulty students for the accumulation of implicit learning while it is a very effective idea to improve explicit learning by supporting and creating the instructional situations of promoting synergic effect between implicit learning and explicit learning.