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...students general education literature classes over nine-day period. ESS instruction focused on three reading strategies: (a) student self-questioning, (b) story-structure analysis, and (c) summarizing. Instruction for the alternative condition, called comprehension skills instruction (CSI), was comprised of a package of research-based reading interventions. Statistically significant differences were found between groups in favor of the ESS Routine on measures of strategy use, story-structure knowledge, and unit reading comprehension. Moreover, results indicated equivalent gains for ESS students regardless of disability versus nondisability category.
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Meeting adequate-yearly-progress (AYP) goals in reading is a challenge for secondary school practitioners. Recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data indicate that more than two-thirds of secondary students, including a high percentage of students with learning disabilities (LD), lack the reading skills necessary to succeed in school and the world of work (Perie, Grigg, & Donahue, 2005).
This record of student failure leaves educators in search of evidence-based practices that can be implemented across secondary settings in an attempt to close the performance gap that emerges between students' literacy skills that have plateaued at the fourth-grade level and the increasing academic grade-level demands (Deshler & Schumaker, 2006). Moreover, because many adolescents with LD are taught in general education settings (IDEA, 2004) so they can earn credits toward graduation, language arts teachers are increasingly being asked to shoulder a major part of the burden for comprehension instruction, especially as it relates to narrative texts. These teachers need evidence-based methods of delivering direct and explicit comprehension instruction that provides the necessary skill development for students with LD and other low-achieving students while simultaneously challenging high-achieving students in the same classroom.
One approach to defining instructional design and delivery to improve reading comprehension was suggested by Kintsch (2004), who argued that the goal of literacy instruction should be to get students engaged in processes equivalent to those that expert readers employ. One such process involves categorizing information in light of certain text structures. According to Kintsch, student knowledge and use of text structure favorably impacts comprehension, just as knowledge of syntax or vocabulary can. Text structure is believed to be most relevant to the reading process during encoding and during the reader's organization of the text into high-order units. While syntactic and semantic instruction foster sentence-level knowledge construction, discourse-level structure construction can be improved by teaching genre-specific text structures. Thus, according to this model, instruction should explicitly introduce students to the use of narrative text structure (or story structure) to aid in the conceptual understanding of narrative texts.
Indeed, awareness of underlying story structure has been shown to improve basic academic performance and lead to higher-order thinking, including causal reasoning (Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001). Narrative text structure has been investigated within three successive phases of research (Olson & Gee, 1988). Early research centered on developing empirical evidence to support a taxonomy of narrative elements that can be used to develop a basic understanding of story construction during encoding (e.g., Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Rumelhart, 1975; Stein & Glenn, 1978; Thorndyke, 1977). Overall, this research supported the existence of various theoretical models of story structure, surfacing universal components of a canonical structure for encoding (e.g., character, setting, conflict, resolution, and theme). Moreover, studies in this phase of research suggested that variations in reader knowledge of story structure are related to reader recall, which led to the second phase of story-structure research.
The second phase of research centered on developmental differences between types of readers with regard to the flexible use and complexity of story structure (e.g., Mandler &Johnson, 1977; Ouellette, Dagostino, & Carifio, 1998; Stein & Glenn, 1978; Whaley, 1981). A limited number of these studies explored developmental differences for individuals with LD (e.g., Montague, Maddux, & Dereshiwsky, 1990; Weaver & Dickinson, 1982). Results from this line of inquiry indicated that there were developmental differences related to story-structure knowledge, with story-structure knowledge appearing initially at the first-grade level and becoming well developed at the sixth-grade level for typical readers. In one study focusing on students with LD (Montague et al., 1990), no main effect was found for grade between 4th- through 11th-grade students with LD, indicating a story-structure plateau similar to the general reading achievement plateau reported by Warner, Schumaker, Alley, and Deshler (1980).
Due to the findings of developmental differences across groups of school-age readers, a third phase of research has focused on the instruction of the previously validated components of story structure to improve reading comprehension. While some studies have included elementary school students (e.g., Carnine & Kinder, 1985; Fitzgerald & Spiegel, 1983; Griffey, Zigmond, & Leinhardt, 1988; Idol & Croll, 1987; Short & Ryan, 1984), four relevant studies were conducted at the secondary level, including students in grades 6 through 11 in instruction of story-structure components.
In the first study, Singer and Donlan (1982) used a control-group design with 27 eleventh-grade students (no students with disabilities) randomly assigned to instructional groups of 15 over a six-day period. Story-grammar instruction was provided to the experimental group. Results on the lone measurement instrument, a 10-question multiple-choice quiz following each of six stories, showed that the only difference between groups was in favor of the experimental group on the quiz taken after the fifth story.
Gurney, Gersten, Dimino, and Carnine (1990) used a multiple-baseline design with seven high school students with LD in instructional groups of two or three in pullout classes over a nine-week period. The authors concluded that, on 7- to 10-question story-grammar and basal-type quizzes given every other day, students showed improvement on questions related to story grammar and no improvement on basal questions (no mean scores were provided on either question type). However, no individual student graphs were shown nor were group means reported, making it difficult to interpret the results.
In the third study, Dimino, Gersten, Carnine, and Blake (1990) conducted an experimental follow-up to Gurney et al.'s study (1990) with 32 low-performing ninth-grade students, including a subset of six students with LD and two students in Title I programs, over 19 days. Students were randomly assigned to the groups after being matched for reading achievement. Results on story-grammar and basal-type quizzes indicated statistically significant differences in favor of the story-grammar instruction group related to scores on story-grammar questions, basal questions, theme questions (a subset of story-grammar questions), and a summarizing task on the posttest and on the maintenance measure (mean raw score differences across all measures ranged from .3 [1.5% of total] to 2.5 [12.5% of total]). Results for the students with LD were not reported separately from group means.
Drawing from the work of Dimino et al. (1990) and Idol and Croll (1987), Gardill and Jitendra (1999) conducted a multiple-baseline study with six middle school students with LD in instructional groups of two in pullout classes. Results showed that (a) all students' scores on story grammar and basal comprehension tests improved concomitant with the onset of instruction, (b) all students' scores increased on generalization and maintenance story-grammar tests from baseline and for four students on basal tests, and (c) five of the six students demonstrated an increase in the number of story elements when they orally retold stories over baseline.
In summary, when instruction in story structure was implemented, results across the studies cited above indicated (a) differences within or between groups on criterion-referenced story-grammar measures (i.e., answering story-grammar-related questions about a given passage) when instruction was multi-phased and at least five hours in length; (b) inconsistent results on students' ability to answer basal (factual) questions; and (c) uncertain benefits for students with LD when taught in a heterogeneous group.
While Gersten and colleagues (2001) are accurate in their conclusion that instructing the awareness of underlying story structures has improved students' basic academic skills in some studies, the research is not complete. Several limitations are associated with the total body of research in this area, including both elementary and secondary studies.
First, there is a paucity of research on heterogeneous groups (or classes) of students that include students with LD, especially at the secondary level. Second, only a few studies focus on even moderate...
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