Academic Achievement and Satisfaction Among University Students With Specific Learning Disabilities: The Roles of Soft Skills and Study-Related Factors.

Understanding the individual qualities sustaining students with and without specific learning disabilities (SLDs) is key to supporting their academic achievement and well-being. In this study, we investigated the differences between students with and without SLDs in terms of intraindividual factors (soft skills and study-related factors), academic and nonacademic outcomes (achievement, academic and life satisfaction), and the relationships between such intraindividual factors and the three outcomes. A total of 318 students (79 males; Mage = 22.7; SD = 3.56; age range = 19-45 years; 147 with SLDs) completed self-reported questionnaires and a measure of fluid intelligence. The results showed that students with SLDs reported higher creativity but lower academic self-efficacy, study resilience, and academic achievement, with small-to-medium effect sizes. In both groups, achievement significantly positively related to academic self-efficacy and negatively to creativity. Life satisfaction was positively related to study resilience; and academic satisfaction was related to critical thinking, curiosity, and academic self-efficacy. Nurturing such intraindividual factors can benefit students with and without SLDs.

Visual lateralisation in quails (Coturnix coturnix).

Two-week-old quails (Coturnix coturnix) were trained to discriminate food grains scattered randomly on a background of small pebbles of similar size adhering to the floor and differing from the grains in texture and hue ("pebble floor task"). Quails tested binocularly or with only their right eye in use showed less pecking to the pebbles and more pecking to the grains than quails tested with only their left eye in use. Adult quails in contrast did not show lateralisation. These findings add to previous evidence for visual lateralisation in birds in the pebble floor task suggesting that neural structures fed by the right eye, mainly located to the left hemisphere, are better suited to rapid visual categorisation of food objects. Like other galliformes species such as the domestic chick (Gallus gallus), but unlike non-galliformes species such as the pigeon, behavioural lateralisation in the pebble floor task may be associated with transitory anatomical asymmetries in the thalamofugal visual pathway.