This literature review examines the use of text-to-speech (TTS) software as an accommodation for students with learning disabilities and its impact on improving reading comprehension. As the development and availability of TTS tools and assistive technologies have increased over the past decade, it is significant to explore how they are used to…

Students who have problems comprehending textual material tend to experience failing grades, peer rejection, and even social isolation. Furthermore, students with poor reading comprehension demonstrate poor academic performance in all subjects, not due to difficulty in learning specific subject content (i.e., math, history, etc.), but rather their…

This quasi-experimental study examined differences in student reading outcomes. Participants were third grade non-struggling readers. Intervention classrooms included core curriculum instruction plus evidence-based reading comprehension instruction and differentiated repeated readings. Comparison classrooms provided core curriculum instruction…

The concept of Matthew effects in reading development refers to a longitudinally widening gap between high achievers and low achievers. Various statistical approaches have been proposed to examine this idea. However, little attention has been paid to psychometric issues of scaling. Specifically, interval-level data are required to compare…

The purpose of this study was to examine the cognitive and academic profiles associated with learning disability (LD) in reading comprehension, word reading, applied problems, and calculations. The goal was to assess the specificity hypothesis, in which unexpected underachievement associated with LD is represented in terms of distinctive patterns…

Roberta, an inclusive kindergarten teacher, and Rajan, an intermediate self-contained classroom teacher, were having a similar conversation with the reading coach who serves their schools. "One research-based strategy for engaging your students in meaningful rereading of texts is readers' theater," said the literacy coach. "Not only…

Williams syndrome is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by deletion of approximately 25 genes on chromosome 7q11.23. Children with the syndrome evidence large individual differences in both broad language and reading abilities. Nevertheless, as a group, children with this syndrome show a consistent pattern characterized by relative…

Students with learning disabilities face real reading challenges. Research into the reading performance of culturally diverse students indicates improved reading performance for culturally diverse students when text matches students' cultural perspective. This quasiexperimental research investigates whether Caucasian and African American students…

Two studies investigated (1) the ability of learning disabled children to perform tasks that specifically demand the recognition and production of main-idea statements, and (2) their ability to detect an inappropriate sentence in a paragraph. (PN)

Investigated whether limitations in the enhancement of learning-disabled readers' working memory (WM) performance are attributable to process or storage functions. Found that: intercorrelations among diverse WP measures increased on demanding conditions; and verbal WM was not directly related to reading skill, supporting the notion that poor…

Analyzes the factor structure of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised (WRMT-R) using data from a sample of special education students. Woodcock asserted that the WRMT-R measured two important aspects of reading ability: Basic Skills and Reading Comprehension. Results of the analyses indicated a robust single factor and provided little…

Investigated the contribution of two working-memory systems (the articulatory loop and the central executive) to the performance differences between learning-disabled and skilled readers. Found that, compared to skilled readers, learning-disabled readers experienced constraints in the articulatory and long-term memory system, and suffered…

The information in this volume documents the author's extensive series of investigations concerning the syntactic abilities of good readers compared to dyslexics with reading comprehension difficulties. Findings corroborate the importance of syntactic ability in the reading process and confirm Goodman's psycholinguistic model of reading. Chapters…

Discussed is an oral reading procedure for children with reading problems which assesses a reader's competency through an analysis of comprehension evidenced by meaningful versus non-meaningful alterations to the reading text. It is explained that this analysis indicates that the poor reader's needs frequently may be at the syntactic and semantic…

Investigates whether improved fluency and comprehension across different stories in repeated reading depend on the degree of word overlap among passages and whether repeated reading is more effective than an equivalent amount of nonrepetitive reading. (HOD)