NICHCY: National Dissemination Center for Children with Disabilitites

The essential skill of reading, including decoding and comprehension, has not been learned by all. The number of children identified with learning disabilities continues to increase in the United States . Of the identified children, the majority are identified in the area of reading. Educators continue to search for interventions to improve students’ reading skills. One format that has provided promise for students with Learning Disabilities (LD) is computer assisted instruction (CAI). To evaluate the extent to which this promise has been realized, this literature review was conducted. A methodical search of the literature on CAI in reading interventions for students with learning disabilities yielded 17 studies. The studies were evaluated by type of computer instruction (drill and practice, strategy, and simulation) and type of reading intervention (prereading, word recognition, vocabulary/language, and comprehension/higher order thinking skills). Results indicate that most CAI programs in reading for this population employ drill and practice procedures, followed by strategy instruction, then simulation. The area of reading intervention focus was evenly split between word recognition and reading comprehension, followed by language/vocabulary, then prereading skills instruction. In many studies CAI was found to be a medium in which children improved reading skills. Those studies demonstrating significant differences favoring a CAI reading intervention, employed effective teaching practices. Several characteristics of effective practices using CAI are highlighted here. Implications for future research employing CAI for students with disabilities in reading are presented.

This article summarizes a comprehensive synthesis of experimental intervention studies that have included students with learning disabilities. Effect sizes for 180 intervention studies were analyzed across instructional domains, sample characteristics, intervention parameters, methodological procedures, and article characteristics. The overall mean effect size of instructional intervention was positive and of high magnitude (M = 0.79). Effect sizes were more positive for a combined model that included components of direct and strategy instruction than for competing models. Interventions that included instructional components related to controlling task difficulty, small interactive groups, and directed responses and questioning of students were significant predictors of effect size, and interventions that varied from control conditions in terms of setting, teacher, and number of instructional steps yielded larger effect sizes than studies that failed to control for such variations. The results are supportive of the pervasive influence of cognitive strategy and direct instruction models for remediating the academic difficulties for children with learning disabilities.

Presents the findings of a meta-analysis involving a sample of children and adolescents who have learning disabilities. Four important findings emerged from the synthesis:

1. Effect sizes for measures of comprehension were higher when studies included derivatives of both cognitive and direct instruction, whereas effect sizes were higher for word recognition when studies included direct instruction;
2. Effect sizes related to reading comprehension were more susceptible to methodological variation than studies of word recognition;
3. The magnitude of ES for word recognition studies was significantly related to samples defined by cutoff scores (IQ > 85 and reading < 25th percentile), whereas the magnitude of ES for reading comprehension studies was sensitive to discrepancies between IQ and reading when compared to competing definitional criteria; and
4. Instructional components related to word segmentation did not enter significantly into a regression analysis for predicting ES estimates of word recognition beyond an instructional core model, whereas small-group interactive instruction and strategy cuing contributed significant variance beyond a core model to ES estimates of reading comprehension.

This paper reports on a meta-analysis of the research literature on effective teaching models for students with learning disabilities. It concludes that: (a) the most effective models combined components of direct and strategy instruction; (b) 8 major instructional factors captured most intervention programs; and (c) the explicit strategy instruction factor best predicted magnitude of treatment outcomes.

The Handbook of Learning Disabilities (LD) is an edited compendium comprised of contributions from over 55 of the leading scholars involved in LD research. Contributing authors were charged with reviewing the major theoretical, methodological, and instructional advances that have occurred in the field over the last 20 years. This particular article appears as Chapter 20 in the 3rd section of the book, "Effective Instruction."