Two main skills have been identified as limiting the success of individuals with learning difficulty at gaining and maintaining employment, (i) they do not tend to work adaptively, that is, to transfer skills between similar tasks (ii) and they do not demonstrate the ability to communicate difficulties when working. Both factors limit their probability of successful normalisation. Traditional (didactic) programs have had limited transfer effects. Our goal was to design training devices for aiding clients to make strategies learnt in previous situations meet the demands of new situations, independently.
One factor in the lack of transfer may be the underdevelopment of self-regulation. For Vygotsky the development of self-regulation relies on a person receiving communicative experiences by which she/he could 'internalise' other's social speech to act as a tool to organise her/his own thought. Procedures for training self-regulation include Self-instruction and Metacognition. To self-instruct is to control one's own behaviour by talking to oneself. Metacognition is to know that by talking to oneself that one is controlling one's own behaviour. We developed both methods for training speaker skills for communicating the identity of target referents on maps. 45 people with learning difficulties were assigned, as matched triplets (on the basis of their psychometric,
linguistic and communicative abilities) to one of three training conditions, Metacognitive (MT), Self-instructional (SIT) and Practice.
After training each group was tested for maintenance of skill on tasks similar to those trained and for mid- to far transfer of strategies to tasks that involved the same role(speaker) but with a different kind of (i) map, (ii) a different task, object assembly, and then (iii) tasks for which they had to be the listener with maps.
Significant positive changes in performance occurred for the speaker role of both training conditions. Far Transfer was evident in significant increases in speaker role scores with object assembly tasks and with listener role tasks for the MT group but not for the SIT group. Successful learning was correlated with abstract reasoning ability in the MT group and language comprehension in the SIT group. Metacognitive training, by accessing people's abstract reasoning ability, made learners aware of the process of generating cognitive strategies and therefore provided furthest transfer.