SCHEMA OF LEARNING DISABLED AND NONDISABLED YOUNGSTERS ON A STORY RETELLING TASK (RECALL, LANGUAGE, ADOLESCENTS)

It has been noted that stories have a structure or schema much the same as sentences have. When stories are well ordered and have a logical progression of events, they are better recalled than less well ordered stories, and a structure is brought to the story so that a schema develops. Students who are having difficulty with learning, such as learning disabled adolescents, may have trouble with the schema of stories. In order to find out how learning disabled adolescents differ in their use of schema, a story retelling task was devised. The aim of this study was to compare the schema of learning disabled adolescents with that of nondisabled adolescents, and with students at least two grades below the adolescents, or in grade four. There were a total of 63 students in this study, 20 in group one, 21 in group two, and 22 in group three. All students had average intelligence, adequate articulation, and could hear within normal limits. The students classified as learning disabled were adolescents in grades six to eight who were reading at least two years below grade level and were receiving support services in a resource setting, or were in self-contained special education programs. The nondisabled students were reading on grade level. For this study, there were four stories, all in the fairy tale or folk-tale genre that were either read or listened to by the students. One was a practice story while the other three were analyzed. Responses were analyzed according to the systems devised for this study which were called, Correct Production, Rules, and Probe Questions. All student responses were recorded on a cassette player for later analysis. Although not all analyses proved significant, there were several significant findings when responses to the three stories were combined. Separate analyses of each story also indicated that the learning disabled group had significantly more errors, fewer correct responses, and had difficulty recalling specific rules, depending upon the story. There were indications that learning disabled adolescents produced more errors and fewer Correct utterances than did the nondisabled middle school groups of students. There was also indication that Rule Deviation 8 (Internal Plan) was used less frequently by the learning disabled group than by the nondisabled middle school students. One can conclude that the learning disabled adolescents are less capable than nondisabled students in utilizing some schema in story retelling