Background: This study's aim was to begin the process of measuring the reading comprehension of adults with mild and borderline learning disabilities, in order to generate information to help clinicians and other professionals to make written material for adults with learning disabilities more comprehensible. Methods: The Test for the Reception of…

The study investigated the compensatory effectiveness of the Quicktionary Reading Pen II (the Reading Pen), a portable device with miniaturized optical character recognition and speech synthesis capabilities. Thirty participants with reading disabilities aged 10-18 were trained on the operation of the technology and given two weeks to practice…

This action research paper depicts the teacher-developed instructional strategies to enhance vocabulary instruction among school-age students in the public school setting. The selected population spans across three school districts and includes a third grade classroom, a fifth grade classroom, as well as a select fourth and fifth grade students…

Anna is a 13-year-old student who has a learning disability and is eligible for special education and related services. Anna's parents enrolled her in the Private Academy for fifth grade; her frustration, inappropriate behaviors, and inattention had increased during fourth grade. In its year-end report, the Private Academy described Anna's…

A study examined the effects of active learning strategies; namely, visualization, questioning, and prediction, upon the reading comprehension performance of learning disabled students. Subjects were 6 12th grade resource room students. Prior to strategy instruction, students read and were tested on 3 reading selections from the literature-based…

This study evaluated effects of a direct instruction main idea summarization program and a self-monitoring technique on the reading comprehension of four sixth-grade students with learning disabilities. A multiple probe across student design was used. One student did not receive instruction and served as a control subject. Student performance was…

Schema Theory, the use of the learner's background knowledge for the building of new knowledge, is applied to improving reading comprehension skills and teaching vocabulary words and concepts to learning disabled students. Semantic mapping is a vocbulary strategy which produces the interaction between prior knowledge in a graphic form. For…

Intended for language learning disabled college students and their tutors, the booklet examines the use of words as aids in understanding an author's meaning. Suggestions are offered to help students adopt a more comfortable and effective reading style. The first section examines ways to decipher authors' context cues for information. Eight…

The effects of vocabulary instruction on word knowledge and reading comprehension were assessed in three experiments. In experiment one, employing 12 "average" fourth grade readers, and experiment two, employing six learning disabled intermediate level students, word synonyms were taught to pairs of students on three consecutive days.…

In the first article, a discussion is given of proficiency, procedures and materials for performance evaluation, instructional placement, and effective teaching tactics for two areas of instruction--word pronunciation and reading comprehension. A measurement focus rather than a method focus toward teaching is emphasized. The second article…

This study investigated the effects of the direction of print on learning-disabled students' and normal students' abilities to learn the sequence in which sentences are presented, to comprehend sentences, and to recognize relationships among sentences. Four groups of 12 learning-disabled pupils and four groups of 12 normal pupils between the ages…

The article contains a review of reading comprehension research since 1980, based on an interactive model of reading, with a focus on reading disabilities/learning disabilities. Included are studies which have investigated the influence of readers' prior knowledge of a topic, the influences of text structure and task demands, and metacognitive…

Identifying the main points of a communication is fundamental to successful reading comprehension. Discussed are difficulties in defining main idea, text structure variables in determining important information, textual hierarchy and the theory of macrostructure, text features signalling important information, summary writing, learning-disabled…

The Corrective Reading Program, a direct instruction approach, resulted in significantly greater improvements than prior years for 78 learning disabled and 41 educable mentally retarded students (grades 6-12). Learning disability subjects demonstrated greater achievement gains in both recognition and comprehension. (CL)

Investigates whether improved fluency and comprehension across different stories in repeated reading depend on the degree of word overlap among passages and whether repeated reading is more effective than an equivalent amount of nonrepetitive reading. (HOD)