The effect of teaching a test-taking strategy to high school students with learning disabilities.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between a test-taking strategy intervention and academic improvement of high school students with learning disabilities. For students with learning disabilities, generalization of learning becomes an ultimate goal. The Test-Taking Strategy is designed to enable students to generalize the strategy to the real world and maintain their use of the strategy over time. However, there have been no studies reported that utilized guided test-taking as a strategy to improve academic performance in high school students with learning disabilities. The experimental subjects for this study were four students with learning disabilities in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades at a high school in North Central West Virginia, who had no previous experience using the Test-Taking Strategy. Baseline data for the experimental and control subjects were obtained from the Pretest in the Instructor\u27s Manual and the scores were reported from the regular classroom teachers\u27 grade books. The experimental group received eight weeks of intervention; sessions were held four times a week for about thirty minutes each. Research hypotheses included increases in test-wiseness and academic achievement. The results validate that high school students with learning disabilities were positively affected by exposure to the Test-Taking Strategy intervention. They were able to utilize at least one subskill from the Test-Taking Strategy for any academic classroom assessments. The Posttest scores increased significantly (p {dollar}\u3c{dollar}.0001) for the experimental sample as demonstrated by an analysis of variance. The two-way analysis of variance revealed a significant difference between the group means and a significant interaction between the subject and group variables. Experimental students improved one letter grade higher on reading and the first category class for the second nine week test than did their peers in the control group. The first category class warranted rejection of the null hypothesis while they were rated higher in achievement relative to the control students in that category. Social studies had a negative effect on the achievement of the experimental students, although it was not statistically significant. The experimental group improved approximately one (.75) letter grade in terms of overall academic achievement for the selected curriculum areas. The results imply that high school students with learning disabilities can learn and use a systematic strategy to cope with test item ambiguity, indecision, and lack of knowledge in selecting correct answers. Second, learning the Test-Taking Strategy may help students with learning disabilities become aware of \u27how-to-do-it\u27 knowledge