THE EFFICACY OF A TRAINED MAPPING STRATEGY ON RECALL OF VOCATIONAL MATERIAL WITH LEARNING DISABLED ADOLESCENTS.

An interest in the development of alternative instructional methods for learning disabled adolescents has emerged within the last few years. Intervention studies examining the effects of cognitive or learning strategies have been proposed as viable alternatives for facilitating the learning of learning disabled youth. This study addressed a specific cognitive or learning strategy entitled "mapping" for improving text recall. Subjects were four diagnosed learning disabled adolescents receiving support services within a high school resource classroom. The design for the study was the A-B-A-B-C design utilized in single subject research. The study consisted of administration of daily text passages and corresponding text passage exams. Each subject was individually trained to utilize the mapping strategy which required the students to take the key concepts presented in the text and develop a diagrammatic representation of these concepts. A self-graphing procedure was utilized to maintain the use of the trained strategy. The results concerning the effectiveness of the mapping strategy indicate that the utilization of the strategy will increase recall of text information among learning disabled adolescents. Maintenance of the trained strategy was demonstrated by two of the four subjects. The two remaining subjects who failed to demonstrate maintenance of the strategy were introduced to the self-graphing procedure. These subjects indicated that a graphic display of exam scores may not be sufficient to develop strategy maintenance. Educational and research implications were discussed