Investigating awareness of and teaching passage organization in learning disabled children

Use of a check-off system to improve middle school students' story compositions

This study examined the effects of a self-management procedure designed to teach three 13- to 14-year-old middle school boys with learning and behavior problems to improve the completeness (inclusion of identified story elements) and quality (organization and coherence) of their story compositions. The procedure was based on two strategies: teaching the students to plan stories composed in a narrative style, and teaching them to monitor the inclusion of elements from the plan with a check-off system. A multiple baseline design was used to assess the effectiveness of the procedure, and a combination of holistic and atomistic ratings was used to assess the completeness and quality of the students' written work. Results indicated that stories were more complete when students used a simple check-off system to plan and monitor their work. In addition, there was a moderate correlation between the atomistic and holistic measures used to assess stories, with the total number of words written correlating most strongly (r = .49) with the overall rating for story quality.

Student Assistant for Learning from Text (SALT): a hypermedia reading aid

Student Assistant for Learning from Text (SALT) is a software system for developing hypermedia versions of textbooks designed to help students with learning disabilities and other low-achieving students to compensate for their reading difficulties. In the present study, 10 students with learning disabilities (3 young women and 7 young men ages 15 to 17) in Grades 9 and 10 read passages from a science textbook using a basic computer version and an enhanced computer version. The basic version included the components found in the printed textbook (text, graphics, outline, and questions) and a notebook. The enhanced version added speech synthesis, an on-line glossary, links between questions and text, highlighting of main ideas, and supplementary explanations that summarized important ideas. Students received significantly higher comprehension scores using the enhanced version. Furthermore, students preferred the enhanced version and thought it helped them learn the material better.

Allocation of study time and recall by learning disabled and nondisabled children of different ages

Study time and recall by learning-disabled and nondisabled children of five different ages were examined in a task requiring recall of digits that were presented at the child's own rate. Recall increased with age and was significantly higher by nondisabled than disabled children, particularly at older ages. As additional digits of each sequence were presented, study time by 8-year-old disabled and nondisabled groups were relatively constant, increased in older disabled and nondisabled children, but increased more in older nondisabled children than older learning disabled children. Instructions in hierarchical grouping of digits increased recall by all groups to a similar degree, but the increase by younger children and learning disabled children was associated with longer study times. The results suggest that allocation of study time and recall are developmentally delayed in learning disabled children.