This study examines the effects of topic interest on the vocabulary learning and retention in third grade students with and without learning disabilities. All students learned 12 unfamiliar vocabulary words in three different vocabulary learning conditions: High-interest topic vocabulary, low-interest topic vocabulary, and vocabulary words without…

The purpose of this article is to provide teachers, tutors and parents with an effective and enjoyable approach to practicing reading fluency, increasing comprehension and encouraging the joy of reading, based on the theories and methods of Sally L. Smith. This method can be applied and adapted to individual student's needs. Sally Smith, the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a text-to-speech software program known as "Read Please" on the reading rate and reading comprehension accuracy of two high school students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) in reading. A single-subject A-B-A-B "withdrawal" research design (Alberto & Troutman,…

Comprehension instruction for students with learning disabilities (LD) is explored from three perspectives, all within the framework of engaging students in meaningful conversations about text with their general education peers. First, excerpts from lesson transcripts are provided to illustrate one special educator's emphasis on student-generated…

The authors examined the effectiveness of cognitive strategy instruction based on PASS (Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, Successive) given by special education teachers to students with ADHD randomly assigned by classroom. Students in the experimental group were exposed to a brief cognitive strategy instruction for 10 days, which was designed to…

We trained 36 12-year-old Chinese students with reading disorders in the analysis, synthesis and integration of orthographic constituents of semantic and phonetic "bujians" (radicals); and also their writing (spelling and composing) skills. These target students were compared with 37 age-controls in a pre-test and post-test design on a…

The purpose of this study was to identify subgroups of adult basic education (ABE) learners with different profiles of skills in the core reading components of decoding, word recognition, spelling, fluency, and comprehension. The analysis uses factor scores of those 5 reading components from on a prior investigation of the reliability and…

Intermediate elementary students (grades 4 and 5) frequently struggle to become scientifically literate in their general education classrooms. Scientific literacy includes knowing how to access and use information found in science texts. Unfortunately, many students struggle to read and understand science texts (Michalsky, Mevarech, & Haibi, 2009,…

The "Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing"[R] ("LiPS"[R]) program (formerly called the "Auditory Discrimination in Depth"[R] ["ADD"] program) is designed to teach students the skills they need to decode words and to identify individual sounds and blends in words. Thirty-one studies reviewed by the What Works…

This study used a multiple baseline across participants design to examine the effects of self-monitoring and active responding on the reading comprehension of three high school seniors with learning disabilities and significant attention problems. The self-monitoring intervention required the participants to read a story and stop reading at three…

Adolescents who struggle in the area of literacy tend to experience difficulty accessing texts across many different content areas. These students could benefit from increased collaborative interactions between general education content area teachers, special education teachers, and other school personnel with expertise in the area of literacy…

For identifying children with four major kinds of verbal learning disabilities viz. reading disability, speech and language comprehension disability, writing disability and mathematics disability, the present task was undertaken to construct and standardize verbal learning disabilities checklist. This checklist was developed by keeping in view the…

This experimental study was conducted to examine the efficacy of repeated reading and wide reading practice interventions for high school students with severe reading disabilities. Effects on comprehension, fluency, and word reading were evaluated. Participants were 96 students with reading disabilities in grades 9-12. Students were paired within…

"READ 180"[R] is a reading program designed for students in grades 3-12 whose reading achievement is below the proficient level. "READ 180"[R] aims to address gaps in individual student's skills through 90-minute sessions, during which students receive several different types of instruction. These sessions can be completed in…

In this study, we conducted 124 observations of 41 special education teachers teaching reading to their third- through fifth-grade students with learning disabilities to determine the extent to which and in what ways they promoted students' reading comprehension. In 42 lessons, we did not observe any comprehension instruction. In 30 lessons, the…