We review the body of research on reading comprehension for students with learning disabilities. First, we describe the factors that lead to the comprehension difficulties of these students. Next we describe our procedures for reviewing the literature on effective instructional methods for this population. Next we review the body of studies involving instructional methods for improving the comprehension of narrative text. This is followed by the research on techniques for improving the comprehension of expository text. We conclude with a discussion of ongoing issues in the field—in particular, (a) the increased use of socially mediated instruction, (b) the need to teach multiple strategies to students to improve comprehension, and (c) controversies in how important it is to explicitly teach specific strategies versus merely providing flexible frameworks to structure dialogue on texts read.

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The studies described here are designed to teach reading comprehension to at-risk students in the second and third grades. The focus is on text structure. First, there is an evaluation of a program that teaches students to identify themes of stories and apply those themes to real life; this instruction goes beyond the plot-level focus of typical primary-grade instruction. Second, an instructional program that teaches a common expository text structure, compare/contrast, is evaluated in a series of studies; content similar to science content typically taught at the primary level is used. The results of these studies suggest that at-risk children in the primary grades can achieve gains in comprehension, including the ability to transfer what they have learned to novel texts, when they are given highly structured and explicit instruction that focuses on text structure.

This article describes a project that integrated basic educational research, the development of an instructional program, and its evaluation in a classroom setting. The program, called The ABDs of Reading, provided explicit training in phoneme analysis and phoneme blending, letter-sound correspondences, and decoding. Recent research indicating the importance of phoneme skills in beginning reading provided a rationale for the program. The results of 2 years of program evaluation in New York City classrooms for learning-disabled children indicated that the program successfully teaches general decoding strategies. That is, instructed children were able to decode novel combinations of letters that were not presented in training. No extensive teachertraining, teacher-aides, or other unusual classroom support was required.The purpose of this article is to describe an instructional program that teaches basic decoding skills to learning-disabled children, to present the rationale for its development, and to present results of field trials designed to evaluate its effectiveness. The project was undertaken primarily to develop and evaluate curriculum materials. The work that was done addresses questions of current research interest and describes a process whereby basic educational research can be translated into usable school materials.The program was developed to serve as a supplement to whatever reading program is being used in the classroom. In the work to be reported here, it was used in remedial instruction. The program's instructional This work was supported by the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped, U.S. Office of Education.I would like to express my appreciation to the New York City Board of Education for its generous cooperation and to all the teachers, administrators, and children who participated in the study. I am especially grateful to

This study evaluated the effectiveness of comprehension training embedded in a program that taught science content to 2nd graders. The program included instruction about the structure of compare-contrast expository text, emphasizing clue words, generic questions, graphic organizers, and the close analysis of well-structured text exemplars. This program was compared with a program that focused on the science content but included no compare-contrast training as well as with a no-instruction control. Regular classroom teachers (14 from 4 schools), randomly assigned to treatment, provided the instruction; 215 students (7-8 years old) participated. The study replicated acquisition and transfer effects found in an earlier study, that is, transfer to compare-contrast text with content related and unrelated to the instructional content (with no loss in the amount of science content acquired). The program also led to better performance on written and oral response measures and on 1 of the 2 measures involving authentic (less well-structured) compare-contrast text. These findings support and extend previous findings that explicit instruction in comprehension is effective as early as the primary-grade level.