This research synthesis was conducted to understand the effectiveness of interventions designed to improve learning from informational text for students with learning disabilities in elementary school (K-5). The authors identified 18 studies through a comprehensive search. The interventions were evaluated to determine treatment effects and to…

To better understand the nature of impairment resulting from attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) for students in a post-secondary education (PSE) setting, the authors analyzed the symptoms and associated impairment of 135 students with a diagnosis of ADHD who were recruited via Student Disability Services in Canadian post-secondary…

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 strong differences in manifestation, prevalence, and incidence in dyslexia across languages invite studies in specific writing systems. In particular, the question of the role played by emergent literacy in opaque and transparent writing systems remains a fraught one. This research project tested, through a 4-year prospective cohort study, an…

The literature has long pointed to heightened frequencies of learning disabilities (LD) within the population of law offenders; however, a systematic appraisal of these observations, careful estimation of these frequencies, and investigation of their correlates and causes have been lacking. Here we present data collected from all youth (1,337…

This article reports on a qualitative study of the school experiences of adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the context of quantitative research on teacher attitudes and practices, adolescent self-appraisals, and social and family relationships. Twelve adolescents with ADHD participated in in-depth, semistructured…

In this longitudinal study, we investigated the role of word reading and mathematical difficulties measured in 9th grade as factors for receiving educational support for learning in upper secondary education in Grades 10 to 12 (from ages 16 to 19) and furthermore as predictors of dropout from upper secondary education within 5 years after…

A pre-post experimental design with 6-week delayed posttest was implemented to investigate the effects of reading comprehension strategy (RCS) instruction with and without attribution retraining (AR) on reading outcomes for seventh, eighth, and ninth graders with learning and other mild disabilities. Students were randomly assigned to one of three…

Examination of methodological issues in the design and interpretation of studies on the genetics of reading disability suggests three tests of increasing rigor for determining whether reading score distributions are categorical and thus not subject to analyses which assume a continuous normal distribution. Also noted are interactive relationships…

This paper reviews criticism on misinterpretation and overuse of significance testing in the social sciences and examines use of effect size measures to enhance interpretation of significance testing. Review of typical effect size measures and their application is followed by analysis of use of effect size measures in studies reported over 10…

Traditional methods of integrating special education research (such as narrative reviews and box score analyses) are described, and the procedures involved in meta-analysis, by which findings from previous studies are systematically synthesized, are detailed. Benefits of this approach are noted. (CL)

The article examines the concepts of power and control in research design and applies them to a review of the validity of three studies (EC 600 064-066) evaluating the effectiveness of using Irlen tinted lenses with reading-disabled persons. Internal validity, external validity, statistical conclusion validity, and construct validity are…

Research articles (n=174) published in the "Journal of Learning Disabilities" from 1989 through 1993 were analyzed and coded by type of research design and statistical technique used. Eighty percent of the research designs were nonintervention methods; 55% of all statistical techniques were coded as primary, 32% were intermediate, and…

Investigated with 64 upper middle class first-grade children of normal intelligence and visual perception was the construct validity of the trait of visual figure-ground perception. (Author/DB)