This study investigated the role of strategy instruction on solution accuracy in children with and without serious math difficulties (MD) in problem solving. Children's posttest solution accuracy was compared on standardized and experimental measures as a function of strategy conditions. Strategy conditions included curriculum materials that…

Educators have widely used cognitive strategy instruction to address reading comprehension deficits evidenced by students with learning disabilities. However, no one has yet conducted a review of the quality of this literature. This review applies the quality indicators advocated by Gersten et al. (2005) and Horner et al. (2005) to evaluate the…

This study evaluates the quality of the research and evidence base for a writing intervention called Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD; Graham & Harris, 1989; Harris & Graham, 1996) for students with and at risk for learning disabilities, using criteria for group research studies suggested by Gersten et al. (2005) and single-subject…

Students learned a strategy for planning, writing, and evaluating compare-contrast essays. Instruction followed the principles of self-regulated strategy development, which aims to improve knowledge about writing, strategic writing processes, self-regulation, and motivation. Six adolescent students, 3 with learning disabilities in writing and 3…

The University of Kansas Institute for Research in Learning Disabilities has designed and validated a set of task-specific learning strategies to teach mildly disabled students "how to learn" so they can more effectively cope with increased curriculum expectations. (Author/CL)

This study determined the effectiveness of Kindergarten Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (K-PALS) for English Learners (ELs). We compared 20 K-PALS ELs to 20 Control ELs and to 20 K-PALS non-ELs on early reading skill acquisition, using a pretest-posttest control group design with matched samples. We also compared proportions of ELs unresponsive…

Based on three areas of research (memory, selective attention, and metacognition), three strategy training interventions with learning disabled children are described: Lloyd's academic strategy training, Torgeson's strategy training, and Deshler's learning strategies model. Individual approaches may be appropriate only for selected subgroups of…

This study assessed the effects of Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS), a reciprocal classwide peer-tutoring strategy, on the reading performance of native Spanish-speaking students with learning disabilities (LD) and their low-, average-, and high-achieving classroom peers. Participants were 132 native Spanish-speaking English language…

This study compared the effectiveness of 3 procedures for teaching 62 elementary students with learning disabilities to identify the correct algorithm in solving addition and subtraction word problems. The group receiving strategy teaching and sequencing practice problems and the group receiving strategy teaching only scored higher than…

A study of three fifth-grade students with learning disabilities examined the effectiveness of a strategy deigned to help them become more reflective when writing opinion essays. Following the instruction, students wrote essays that were longer, provided more support for their premise, and were qualitatively better. (Author/CR)

This study, with 30 students with learning disabilities (grades 6-9) and 15 nondisabled students, found that instruction in a 5-rule summarization strategy significantly increased reading comprehension of expository prose. Strategy use was maintained over time, and students were reported to generalize its use. (Author/DB)

Twenty-eight students (ages 9-12) with learning disabilities were taught a spelling study procedure (SSP), followed by instruction in self-monitoring of performance (SMP) and self-monitoring of attention (SMA). On-task behavior was significantly higher in both SMA and SMP than in SSP. Neither SMP nor SMA were inherently superior across subjects,…

Two short-term strategy training programs were used to teach learning disabled 9- to 12-year-old students (N=42) to use an organizational strategy for a memory task. A three-rule program stressing the acquisition of specific strategy content showed a greater transfer of learning than a six-rule program teaching both specific strategy content and…

This evaluation study (with 45 middle school students with learning disabilities) found that students trained in summarization procedures performed significantly higher on all dependent measures of reading comprehension than those receiving traditional instruction. Also, on some measures, students also trained in self-monitoring outperformed those…

Forty learning-disabled fourth graders learned to use a spelling study strategy, studied words under varying conditions, and predicted their scores on a subsequent test. Results indicated that, even without inclusion of specific metacognitive training components, strategy training produced important metacognitive improvement and that metacognitive…