The conclusions drawn out of the research broadly supported acceptance of the project's hypotheses, firstly that students with identified dyslexia who are studying at university present significantly lower levels of academic confidence than their non-dyslexic peers.

 

Additionally, it was shown that the process by which students identified with dyslexia were told of their dyslexia can impact on their levels of academic confidence. Students diagnosed with dyslexia as a disability presented significantly lower levels of academic confidence in comparison to students whose dyslexia had been identified as a learning difference. This implies that taking a more neutrally nuanced approach during the process of assessment may be an important factor that helps to guide an individual towards internalizing their dyslexia more positively into their self-concept. However the research was not able to determine the extent to which students' dyslexia assessment might be the main contributing factor to reduced academic confidence. Although the sample of students with dyslexia was reasonable, (n=68), subsets of this sample established from the matrix of assessment variables (that is for example, diagnosed as a disability, or identified as a difference, to name just two) generated sample sizes too small for reliable statistical analysis to be performed. Hence one item on the agenda for further research is to obtain more data from a wider and more numerous sample of the dyslexic student community.

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Finally, and perhaps of the greatest interest, was the outcome that identified some students from the (self-declared) non-dyslexic group as presenting characteristics and attributes widely seen in students from the dyslexic group. Perhaps these were students with unidentified dyslexia. However, as the study's data collection tool was not, and did not purport to be a dyslexia screener, this was not known. But the most pertinent outcome was that this small sub-group of quasi-dyslexic students presented levels of academic confidence that was measurably higher than their dyslexia-identified peers, nearly, but not quite, on a par with students in the non-dyslexic group more widely. Although marginal rather than a significant result statistically, it is sufficiently interesting to indicate the need for further research, not least be acquiring a greater range and depth of data.

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Does any of this matter? The implications of this last outcome suggests that from an academic confidence point of view at least, identifying dyslexia in university students may have a detrimental impact on their academic confidence. Since some recent research has further suggested that academic confidence may be linked to absolute performance in an academic task (Klassen, 2006, amongst others), and hence by implication, more broadly to academic achievement, further research to understand more about the relationships between learning differences and academic confidence in communities of learners in Higher Education may be of value.