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Article Excerpt
Abstract. We compared a reading intervention that consisted of explicit, self-regulatory strategy instruction to a strategy intervention that was less explicit to determine the impact on the reading-specific self-efficacy, attributions, and affect of students with reading disabilities (RD). Participants included 20 students with RD who were entering grades 4-8. The interventions were delivered on a one-to-one basis over five weeks, four days per week, for one hour per day. Those receiving the explicit, self-regulatory strategy intervention showed greater gains in their attributions to incorrect strategy usage for reading failure than participants in the less explicit intervention. Group differences approached statistical significance on the reading self-efficacy measure, with the less explicit intervention showing higher reading self-efficacy at posttest than the explicit, self-regulatory intervention. The possibility of miscalibrated reading self-efficacy and reading skill in students with RD is discussed.
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Older students with reading disabilities (RD), those in the upper elementary grades and beyond, are particularly at risk for developing motivational problems related to reading. In fact, a downward trend in reading motivation with age has been found in the population at large, not just specific to students with RD (McKenna, Kear, & Ellsworth, 1995). Diminishing reading motivation is particularly stark for poor readers in the post-primary grade years. An illustrative example of the extent of these declines in reading motivation is a study by Juel (1988), who found 40% of poor readers in the fourth grade would rather clean their room than read, with one student stating, "I'd rather clean the mold around the bathtub than read" (p. 442). Decreasing reading motivation is especially alarming given that motivational and attitudinal characteristics are better predictors of reading achievement as children get older than when children are in the early elementary grades (Paris & Oka, 1989).
Young children's motivation to read is typically less affected by failure than older children's. Until about the third grade, children tend to be generally unable to measure their abilities in relation to objective criteria (Stipek, 1981). Furthermore, young children do not make a distinction between effort and ability when considering the reasons for success and failure. Therefore, in the eyes of a young child, an individual who works hard is one who has high ability (Nicholls, 1990). It is not until children are around 11 years old that they begin to clearly differentiate between ability and effort, which may lead to negative motivational outcomes for some (Nicholls, 1978). Students who have to work hard to succeed are thought to have less ability than those who expend little effort. As Pressley (1998) stated, "The older the struggling reader, the more the struggle will be interpreted as reflecting low ability with the child unmotivated to learn to read" (p. 233).
Concurrent with these developmentally appropriate changes in attributional thinking, older children also experience declines in egocentric viewpoints and increase their use of social comparison when evaluating their abilities (Piaget, 1965). Social comparison becomes particularly salient during the upper-elementary years due to an increase in classroom competition (Harter, Whitesell, & Kowalski, 1992).
Along with a natural decline in reading motivation, students are challenged with a more rigorous curriculum once they exit the early elementary years. No longer is instruction focused on learning to read; emphasis is now placed on reading to learn (Allington & Johnston, 2002). Once students enter the fourth grade, they are predominantly expected to work with expository text rather than the narrative text of their earlier school years (Wilson & Rupley, 1997).
Despite this increase in complexity of text, conventional instruction does not involve the use of comprehension instruction to meet the demands of expository material. Over 20 years ago, Durkin (1978-79) investigated the use of reading comprehension strategy instruction in classrooms and in over 4,400 minutes of observation only observed 20 minutes of comprehension instruction. Twenty years after Durkin's study, Pressley, Wharton-McDonald, Mistretta-Hampston, and Echevarria (1998) reported rarely observing explicit comprehension strategy instruction in fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms.
What do these circumstances mean for students with RD? As they begin the post-primary grades, these students carry with them a history of academic failure. Additionally, they possess a newly acquired manner of thinking about their academic performance that is more realistic and therefore less self-protective, only to be met with a curriculum that requires basic academic skill mastery as a prerequisite despite their lack of these skills. Not surprisingly, then, students with learning disabilities (LD) have been described as experiencing learned helplessness in academic settings (Grimes, 1981). Those who are thought to be learned helpless believe they possess little control over academic outcomes even if they put forth effort. In the social cognitive literature, this loss of personal agency over academic outcomes has been portrayed as being cognitively mediated through the control-related concepts of attributional style (Weiner, 1974) and self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997). Maladaptive control-related beliefs not only impede academic motivation, they also play a causal role in the development of negative affect (Bandura, Pastorelli, Barbaranelli, & Caprara, 1999).
Students with LD tend to have significantly less adaptive attributional styles than their typically achieving peers. When thinking about the reasons why they fail, students with LD are more likely than their typically achieving peers to make attributions to internal and stable causes (e.g., ability; Ayres, Cooley, & Dunn, 1990; Kistner, White, Haskins, & Robbins, 1985). In response to success, students with LD are more likely than typically achieving students to perceive little personal responsibility for these outcomes, and, instead, believe their success is due to external and unstable factors (e.g., luck; Pearl, 1982; Short, 1992). Attributions are important to consider in instructional planning for students with LD because even the most proven instructional technologies may be ineffective with students who do not believe they possess control over their learning.
According to Bandura (1986), self-efficacy refers to "people's judgments of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performances" (p. 391). Applying the concept of self-efficacy to academic settings, Schunk (1991) stated that students with low self-efficacy in specific academic areas are likely to avoid tasks within those areas, put forth minimal effort, and tend to give up when encountering difficulty. Self-efficacy is also positively related to students' academic achievement, cognitive engagement, and willingness to employ learning strategies (Linnenbrink & Pintrich, 2003; Pintrich & DeGroot, 1990).
Given the importance of behaviors such as effort and persistence to the academic success of students with LD, it is surprising that only two studies have investigated reading-specific self-efficacy in this population. Whereas Tabassam and Grainger (2002) found students with LD to have lower reading self-efficacy than typically achieving students, Pintrich, Anderman, and Klobucar (1994) noted that the reading self-efficacy of students with LD was comparable to that of typically achieving students despite significantly lower reading skills. When general academic self-efficacy has been investigated in students with LD, they have been found to have lower self-efficacy than typically achieving students (Hampton, 1998; Hampton & Mason, 2003).
Poor self-efficacy is often causal in the pathway to depression (Bandura et al., 1999). Likewise, maladaptive attributions are associated with negative emotions such as guilt and shame (Weiner, 1974) as well as negative affective states such as depression (Gladstone & Kaslow, 1995). Both depression and anxiety have been found to be more pervasive in students with LD than in the population at large (Hall & Haws, 1989; Stein & Hoover, 1989). In relation to the development of instructional planning for students with RD, negative affect is an important variable to consider because it impacts not only students' emotional well-being but also their academic performance.
According to Pekrun (1992), at least two routes potentially explain how affect impacts learning. One route is the impact on working memory. For example, Linnenbrink, Ryan, and Pintrich (1999) found negative affect to be related to poor working memory functioning. These researchers hypothesized that individuals who experience negative affect tend to engage in a multitude of task-irrelevant thoughts, causing the capacity of working memory to be overworked. Another route suggested by Pekrun is through the impact of affect on cognitive and self-regulatory strategies. Support for this route was provided by Turner, Thorpe, and Meyer (1998), who found elementary students with high levels of negative affect engaged in less sophisticated and less complex self-regulatory strategy usage than students with lower levels of negative affect. Positive emotions have been found to aid in the use of flexible learning strategies and sophisticated metacognitive monitoring (Pekrun et al., 2002).
The difficulties of students with RD cannot be explained through a "cold cognitive" model given the impact of motivational and affective characteristics on academic performance (Pintrich, Marx, & Boyle, 1993). Consequently, interventions designed to improve the reading skills of these students should be evaluated based not only on their impact on reading performance but also their influence on motivational and affective characteristics. Interventions that improve reading skills while concurrently restoring students' belief in their control over learning are more valuable than interventions that only indicate reading improvement. An unanswered question in the literature is how best to develop the control-related beliefs and motivation of students with RD.
Two lines of thinking appear to exist in the literature regarding the answer to this question. They are analogous to Calsyn and Kenny's (1977) categorization of the self-concept intervention research into the self-enhancement and skill development models. The line of thinking akin to the self-enhancement model rests upon the assumption that students' motivational and affective characteristics must be addressed directly and separately from their academic skills. The intended goal within this model is to improve academic achievement by first improving the self. Arguing that interventions based on this model have not realized their intended results, Chapman and Tunmer (2003) stated, "There is little evidence to support the idea that improving self-perceptions independently of academic tasks will directly lead to improved academic performance" (p. 17).
The line of thinking consistent with the skill development model assumes that motivational and affective characteristics will improve in concert with academic skills. A considerable body of studies indicates that reading comprehension strategy instruction is effective in improving the reading comprehension skills of students with RD (Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001); however, to date no studies have examined how these instructional procedures impact the reading self-efficacy, attributions, and affect of students with RD. Moreover, the debate regarding the degree of explicitness required for strategy instruction to be optimally effective is relevant not only in relation to improved reading skill but also reading-related motivational and...
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