There is a range of reasons why college students may be underprepared to read, but one possibility is that some college students are below a threshold of proficiency in the component skills of reading. The presence of thresholds means that when students fall below that threshold, their proficiency in that component skill of reading is not…

Early identification of learning difficulties is a critical component of the Response to Intervention (RtI) model. In kindergarten, the screening of foundational reading skills can provide a data-based guideline for identifying students requiring a more intensive response-based intervention before starting elementary school. This study examines…

The authors examined three instructional approaches for improving teachers' curriculum-based measurement (CBM) graph comprehension, each differing in the extent to which reading the data, interpreting the data, and linking the data to instruction were emphasized. Participants were 164 elementary school teachers who were randomly assigned to one of…

Adult literacy interventions often rely on models of reading validated with children or adult populations with a broad range of reading abilities. Such models do not fully satisfy the need for intervention research and development for adults with low literacy. Thus, the authors hypothesized that a model representing the relationship between…

Children with nonverbal learning disabilities (NVLD) have been found to be worse at recognizing facial expressions than children with verbal learning disabilities (LD) and without LD. However, little research has been done with adolescents. In addition, expressing and understanding facial expressions is yet to be studied among adolescents with LD…

The aim of the study was to examine the profiles of children with a family history (FH+) of language-learning impairments (LLI) and a control group of children with no reported family history of LLI (FH-) and identify which language constructs (receptive or expressive) and which ages (2 or 3 years) are related to expressive and receptive language…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a comprehension program integrated with social studies instruction designed for at-risk second graders. The program included instruction in cause-effect text structure, emphasizing clue words, generic questions, graphic organizers, and the close analysis of specially constructed cause-effect target…

Seven fables were read to 14 average learners and 14 children with learning disabilities (ages 10-13), and 4 possible moral choices were presented (1 correct, 1 related, and 2 incorrect). Children with learning disabilities less often selected the correct moral; and when they did, they were less capable of explaining their choice. (Author/JDD)

Literature on metacognition, particularly studies by A. L. Brown and J. H. Flavell, are reviewed, and it is argued that a learning disabled adolescent may become a more active learner by being taught a system of strategies for learning. Comprehension skills, motivation, and metacognitive skills are interdependent. (Author/CL)

To investigate differences between learning disabled and nonhandicapped adolescents in comprehension of pronoun-antecedent relationships, a pronoun reference task was administered to 75 learning disabled (LD), nonacademic, and academic 10th and 11th graders in a middle-class suburban high school. Results indicated that LD students may have…

The adequacy of the revised instructions for the analogies portion of the Word Comprehension (WC) subtest (Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised) was examined with 44 learning-disabled junior high students. Effects of presenting 15 additional sample items prior to administration were examined. Analysis of covariance demonstrated significant…

Comparison of alpha amplitudes of 12 children with learning disabilities and 12 normally achieving controls in three task situations found no significant differences between groups in alpha amplitude but a significant task effect with the vigilance, story comprehension, and rehearsal conditions showing decreasing alpha amplitudes in both groups of…

Learning-disabled and average learners (N=52) in grades 2, 4, and 6 were asked to tell the meanings of 12 proverbs. Only at the sixth grade level was a moderately significant difference in metaphoric comprehension found. (Author/DB)

In an investigation of comprehension monitoring skills of learning disabled and average seventh-grade students, average students spontaneously activated comprehension monitoring strategies thereby noting the text inconsistencies regardless of the condition. Learning disabled students, however, activated these strategies only when cued to do so.…

The ability to identify six facial expressions was studied in 48 nondisabled children and 76 children with learning disabilities (LD) ages 9 through 12. Overall, the nondisabled group had better interpretive ability. Among LD children, those with verbal deficits had better ability than either those with nonverbal deficits and or those with both…