CONTENT-SPECIFIC AND GENERAL READING DISABILITIES OF SECONDARY-LEVEL STUDENTS - IDENTIFICATION AND EDUCATIONAL RELEVANCE

The purposes of this study were (a) to examine the diagnostic utility of reading from text for distinguishing students with general reading disabilities from those whose reading deficits are related to backgrou nd knowledge in specific content areas, and (b) to establish the educa tional utility of these two subgroups. Participants were 121 students (71 male and 50 female) in the 10th grade who were participating in a larger study to examine the contribution of reading to the academic su ccess of secondary students. Students first completed a background-kno wledge vocabulary test. Then they read aloud from English and science texts, studied and answered multiple-choice questions based on the sel ected texts, and finally read aloud from the texts again. The discrepa ncy between student performance in reading aloud from the prestudy Eng lish and science texts was utilized to formulate two subgroups: studen ts with general reading deficits defined by low reading scores in both English and science, and students with content-specific deficits defi ned by reading scores in English that were substantially higher than i n science. Results of the discrepancy analysis yielded a group of 33 s tudents with general deficits and 6 students with content-specific def icits. To examine the educational utility of these groups, content-spe cific and matched general-deficit groups were compared on their postst udy reading performances of the science passage. Poststudy reading sco res for the content-specific group were significantly higher than for the general-deficit group, suggesting that students in the content-spe cific group benefited more from study of the text than did students in the general-deficit group. Additional analyses supported the hypothes is that the content-specific deficits were due to a lack of back. grou nd knowledge. Results lend support to the possibility that reading fro m text can be used by teachers as a diagnostic tool to identify educat ionally relevant subtypes of students with learning difficulties in th e content areas.