Reading comprehension interventions for middle school students with learning disabilities: a synthesis of 30 years of research

The authors conducted a synthesis of studies of reading comprehension interventions for middle school students (Grades 6–8) identified with a learning disability. They identified 12 studies between 1979 and 2009 with treatment and comparison designs and 2 single-participant studies. Findings from the studies indicate large effect sizes for researcher-developed comprehension measures. Few studies (n = 4) reported standardized measures of reading comprehension, which indicated medium effect sizes. The majority of study treatments (n = 13) utilized strategy instruction related to main idea or summarization. Keywords reading comprehension, middle school, learning disabilities, synthesis Reading to learn is an essential skill for middle school stu-dents (Grades 6–8); however, reading for understanding still remains to be a challenge for many such students (Gajria, Jitendra, Sood, & Sacks, 2007; U.S. Department of Education, 2007). Middle school students with learning dis-abilities (LD) are particularly vulnerable to the challenges of reading for understanding (Edmonds et al., 2009). For example, middle school students are expected to read greater amounts of information across subject areas com-pared to students in upper elementary grades (Gajria et al., 2007); however, 21 % of secondary students with LD are estimated to be at least five grade levels below their peers i