Students with learning disabilities: Homework problems and promising practices

Students with learning disabilities are more likely than other students to have problems doing homework. In this article, we describe how deficits in language, attention, memory, and organizational skills as well as in readin g, writing, and math affect homework performance. We describe family and sc hool factors that may exacerbate-or ameliorate-their problems as well as th e intervention research that has included students with learning disabiliti es. At this point, there appears to be a huge gap between the strategies su ccessfully applied in intervention studies and teachers' preferences for in terventions, a serious issue that spills over and has a negative influence on family life. Nonetheless, an emerging area of intervention research sugg ests that effective efforts to improve homework completion, accuracy, and t est performance may require parental involvement, peer cooperation, self-mo nitoring and graphing, "real-life" assignments, teachercollaborative proble m solving, or all.