Background: Fewer girls than boys are identified as struggling at school for suspected problems in attention, learning and/or memory. The objectives of this study were to: i) identify dimensions of cognition, behaviour and mental health in a unique transdiagnostic sample of struggling learners; ii) test whether these constructs were equivalent for boys and girls, and; iii) compare their performance across the dimensions.
Methods: 805 school-aged children, identified by practitioners as experiencing problems in cognition and learning, completed cognitive assessments, and parents/carers rated their behaviour and mental health problems.
Results: Three cognitive [Executive, Speed, Phonological], three behavioural [Cognitive Control, Emotion Regulation, Behaviour Regulation], and two mental health [Internalising, Externalising] dimensions distinguished the sample. Dimensions were structurally comparable between boys and girls, but differences in severity were present: girls had greater impairments on performance-based measures of cognition; boys were rated as having more severe externalising problems.
Conclusions: Gender biases to stereotypically male behaviours are prevalent among practitioners, even when the focus is on identifying cognitive and learning difficulties. This underscores the need to include cognitive and female-representative criteria in diagnostic systems to identify girls whose difficulties could go easily undetected.
Keywords: behaviour; cognition; learning difficulties; mental health; sex differences; transdiagnostic.
© 2022 The Authors. JCPP Advances published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.