Using the observation procedures developed by Leinhardt, Zigmond, and Cooley (1981), we conducted a large-scale field study of reading instruction in special education resource room programs for fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade mildly handicapped students. Children in 23 resource rooms in one district and those from 5 resource rooms in another district were observed during reading instruction. Observations were also made in regular classrooms for a subset of handicapped students and their nonhandicapped peers. The research sought to answer questions regarding the standardization of resource room reading instruction, the nature and amount of reading instruction in these programs, factors associated with how students are scheduled for special reading instruction, reading instruction in resource rooms versus regular classrooms, and special education students' reading instruction (resource room plus classroom) versus that of nonhandicapped peers. Processproduct relations similar to those of the Leinhardt et al. research in learning disabilities classrooms were also tested. Results indicated considerable variability in reading instruction across programs and students that was not strongly linked to student characteristics. Overall, the amount of reading instruction was remarkably low, and instructional process variables in resource rooms were not predictive of achievement.The number of children said to require remedial help has increased dramatically in the last two decades. To illustrate, 120,000 children wereThe authors are grateful to
Thirty-two elementary learning disabled students were randomly assigned either to a condition in which they were trained to use a comprehension monitoring strategy or to a control condition. In the strategy condition, students were instructed to write brief restatements of the important ideas of paragraphs as they read. Following training, all students read and completed comprehension measures for narrative passages under conditions which constituted (a) a test of training, (b) a near transfer test, and (c) a remote transfer test. In all instances the strategy-trained students exhibited better comprehension than did the control students.
Thirty-two LD and 32 average elementary students, matched by grade, read under three conditions: a classroom group condition, an individual (child and examiner) condition, and an individual restatement condition, requiring subjects to summarize, or restate, the contents of each paragraph during passage reading. Overall results of comprehension tests failed to confirm predicted differential effects of conditions on attentional control. The performance pattern across conditions was the same for both reader groups, although LD students' comprehension was considerably lower than that of their average peers. The condition requiring restatements resulted in superior performance for both reader groups suggesting that average as well as LD readers did not always process the texts actively under the group and individual reading conditions.
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