Effects of reading comprehension interventions for students with learning disabilities. Learning Disability Quarterly

Abstract. We examined 48 studie of interventions designed to dlfeL the reading comptehension of students with leaiua g diabilitiee ancoded their characteristics and efful sizes. Our analyses reveaied that students who received the resecluders' experimental methods obtlined reading uiiupieheamsion scores that were higher than those of 87 % of stude-nis in comparison groups. Strong effeIs were more likely when students ' perfoiuicue was assessed on lower level conup-ehension measures, when the study author delivered the ieleventions, and when the experimental stu-dents ' perfouiance was coonpaaed to that of students who did not receive any spe-cial iileivention. These results id;rle that althoug efflive reading compielen-sion interventions exist, there are gaps between their use in reseuch and practice. Students must engage in several cognitive tasks as they read. First, they must recognize words and associate them with familiar concepts and meanings; second, they must recognize iso-lated sentences and sentence pairs and use those to build a representation of the larger text (Per-fetti, 1985). Poor readers often lack the skills necessary to recognize words and sentences; as a result, they are unable to understand text (Per-fetti, 1985). And, readers who are able to recog-nize words and sentences do not consistently use strategies for remembering and interpreting as they read (Ryan, 1981). Researchers have taught diverse reading skills to students with learning disabilities to nilpiove their coiipirehension of words, sentences, and text. Further, they have taught students to iden-tify vocabulary (e.g., Pany, Jenkins, & Schreck, 1982); to remember phrases and facts (e.g., Scruggs & Mastropieri, 1989); and to think about the purpose of their reading (e.g., Won