Specific Learning Disorders (SLD) are increasing among university students. Nevertheless, the existing literature includes a small number of empirical studies exploring the prevalence of undergraduates with SLD and their characteristics, especially in the Italian context. Previous research shows that individuals with SLD may tend to fail in obtaining their standards, perceiving them as unattainable. As this theme is relevant in perfectionistic tendencies, the present work focuses on evaluating perfectionism, mental distress, and academic achievement of Italian university students with SLD, and comparing their scores with those reported by students without LSD. A web-based survey will be implemented allowing the self-administration of the questionnaires and data collection. Besides improving knowledge on perfectionism, mental difficulties, and academic success in LSD, the results can contribute to plan interventions for addressing LSD-related problems and improve academic performance.
Existing literature does not include research in the specific area of perfectionism in SLDs. To the best of our knowledge, there is only one study that has addressed this topic (Stoeber & Rountree, 2020). Notwithstanding the aforementioned research presented some limitations. For instance, it merely included university students presenting dyslexia and did not expand findings to other types of SLDs. Moreover, authors did not include a control group without SLDs, thus impeding the comparison between the two groups on perfectionistic levels. Third, authors did not examine difficulties in learning perceived from participants and consequentially did not explore whether perfectionistic facets were associated with SLDs-related self-reported problems. An important strength of the present study is that it will include university students with a clear diagnosis of SLDs as well as students without SLDs, in order to assess group differences in self-reported demographic and clinical characteristics. Moreover, the identification of perfectionistic profiles will be crucial to further examine these different groups in relation to mental distress and academic achievement. This point is particularly relevant as literature showed that identifying different groups of students with distinct relations to perfectionistic tendencies and subsequent relations to distress and well-being highlighted the importance of fundamental different needs for different groups of individuals. Understanding the specific needs of students with SLDs is crucial to identify their special needs, especially considering that literature encourages the implementation of individualized therapeutic interventions (Roer-Strier, 2002). The relevance of the present project is also derived from the inclusion of a measure for the assessment of mental distress. The literature consistently indicates that children and adolescents with SLDs frequently present emotional problems (Willcutt et al., 2000), whereas evidence on young adulthood is poor and mixed (Valenti et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2021), suggesting that further evidence is needed. Last but not least, whereas some evidence on SLDs among Italian university students is scarce but available in the literature (Longobardi et al., 2019; Matteucci & Soncini, 2021; Valenti et al., 2018), estimates on the prevalence of perfectionism are still lacking, and the present study will be able to fill this important gap.