TEXT COMPREHENSION TRAINING FOR DISABLED READERS - AN EVALUATION OF RECIPROCAL TEACHING AND TEXT ANALYSIS TRAINING-PROGRAMS

Forty-six reading disabled adolescents were randomly assigned to one o f three 25-hr instructional programs. Two programs provided training i n expository text comprehension, and a third offered training in acade mic problem solving and organizational and study skills (an alternativ e treatment control). One reading comprehension program was designed t o remediate a deficient knowledge base, forcing disabled readers to el aborate and further process new text knowledge, focusing on both speci fic informational content in a text and knowledge of text structure pe r se. The second program was patterned after the Palincsar and Brown ( 1984) reciprocal teaching techniques and focused on training four text comprehension strategies used by skilled comprehenders. Both the ''kn owledge-base'' and the ''strategy'' training approaches were associate d with significant improvement in disabled readers' comprehension skil ls, although training effects did not generalize across all aspects of reading comprehension performance. Strategy-trained readers applied t he trained strategies with equal success on instructed and uninstructe d text materials, providing strong evidence of transfer of learning. K nowledge-base readers also demonstrated successful transfer of specifi cally trained procedures (semantic mapping, text analysis) to unfamili ar text. In both programs, the best outcomes were obtained when specif ic strategies and operations were targeted for training. (C) 1996 Acad emic Press, Inc.