Reading is the foundation for literacy and comprehension is the foundation for education. Many learning disabled students struggle to understand what they have read and many instructional approaches in small group settings focus on decoding rather than on comprehension. Employing a dual strategic approach to facilitate comprehension enables…

Multipass, a learning strategy derived from the SQ3R study technique was taught to eight learning disabled adolescents. Results show that a specific instructional methodology can be effectively used to teach a complex learning strategy to learning disabled adolescents. (Author)

Content analysis of two reading series intended for remedial students indicates that (1) neither provides a balance of types of literature; (2) both claim to be interested in the attitudes and interests of readers, but that's not evident in text selections; and (3) both portrayed the usefulness of reading most often as a reading-related theme. (FL)

The Learning Disabilities Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University, was organized as five task forces, conducting research in specific areas: memory and study skills, problems in learning basic skills (arithmetic, reading, and spelling, and reading comprehension, (from the perspectives of interaction of text and reader and of semantics…

This study examined the contributions of instruction in goal setting and self-instruction on the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of a reading comprehension strategy by 47 students (grades 4-6) with learning disabilities. Results indicate that instruction in goal setting and self-instruction did not augment the comprehension…

Correlations between phonological, orthographic, semantic, metacognitive, and working memory measures were studied for 40 learning-disabled students and 40 skilled readers ages 8 to 12. Results suggest that the cognitive processes that contribute to reading deficits are best understood in the context of their combination with other operations.…

The study investigated effects of training 12 adolescents with learning disabilities in a 7-step word identification strategy (using a general problem-solving strategy with specific substrategies) and found significant gains in word identification but inconsistent gains in comprehension. (DB) (DB)

The study found that instructing 13 learning-disabled junior high students in the necessary prior knowledge (information and vocabulary concepts) led to superior reading comprehension performance. Textually explicit text structure also improved reading comprehension. (DB)

The effects of semantic and syntactic complexity on the reading comprehension of content-area prose were investigated among 92 adolescents with learning disabilities. Subjects who read passages that had been modified syntactically or both syntactically and semantically exhibited improved comprehension. Semantic modifications alone did not affect…

The study found that a computerized study guide was more effective than notetaking in increasing textbook comprehension with 18 remedial and 13 learning disabled ninth grade students in a world geography class. (DB)

Assessment of 15 students with learning disabilities (ages 9-13) found that their ability to answer comprehension and synthesis questions was poorer than that of their peers, but their ability to answer knowledge, analysis, and application questions was commensurate with age peers. Findings suggest that individual assessment of levels of…

This article compares four theories relating vocabulary knowledge to reading comprehension and applies these theories to vocabulary development instructional approaches for various types of students with problems in reading comprehension. The four theories are the instrumentalist hypothesis, the aptitude hypothesis, the access hypothesis, and the…

Investigation of the relationship between short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) with 75 children and adults with learning disabilities and 86 children without learning disabilities concluded that STM and WM reflect different processes, both of which seem to separate the 2 ability groups. Both STM and WM were related to reading…