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Article Excerpt
Abstract. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of teaching eight secondary students with disabilities, including seven with learning disabilities, a strategy for answering a variety of inferential questions. A multiple-baseline across-subjects design was employed. Outcome measures included scores on researcher-devised comprehension quizzes, a standardized test of reading comprehension, a strategy use test, a strategy knowledge test, and a reading satisfaction measure. Fidelity of implementation, instructional time, and maintenance of skills were also measured. Results suggest that students with disabilities can learn to use a strategy to answer a variety of inferential questions, and mastery of its use can result in improved scores on criterion-based and standardized measures of reading comprehension. In addition, students' satisfaction with their reading improved.
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The current educational climate and its calls for increased skill acquisition and rising performance demands are requiring students to learn higher-order reading skills, like inference skills (e.g., American Institute for Research, 2005; Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2006). With few exceptions, all secondary students, including students with disabilities (SWD), are required to take rigorous state reading competency exams, most of which involve the use of inference skills. At present, 26 states administer exit exams, and 19 of them withhold diplomas based on poor performance on the exit exams (Center on Education Policy, 2005).
Increased local demands appear to be rising in tandem with the level of reading skills evaluated by national standardized assessment exams. For example, the proposed 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading framework reflects expansion from its current 1992-2007 framework, to include the assessment of broader reading content and deeper cognitive processes (American Institute for Research, 2005). This framework represents a shift from assessing skills at the literal/word level of reading comprehension to assessing higher-order skills within reading comprehension that emphasize "interpreting and integrating" reading matter, the very skills required to make inferences.
This climate of increased reading demands in schools and on tests poses significant challenges for struggling adolescent readers. For students who have a disability, increased demands are especially problematic (Bulgren, Marquis, Deshler, Schumaker, & Lenz, 2006; Schumaker, Deshler, Bui, & Vernon, 2006). Some research has shown that students with learning disabilities (LD) enter seventh grade reading, on average, at the fourth-grade level, and they do not make gains in reading achievement as they progress through the secondary grades (Deshler & Schumaker, 2006; Deshler et al., 2006; Warner, Schumaker, Alley & Deshler, 1980). Further, large proportions of these students are failing their state reading competency exams (Heubert, 2002), as well as tests in their required high school courses (Bulgren, Schumaker, & Deshler, 1988; Hughes, Deshler, Ruhl, & Schumaker, 1993; Wagner et al., 2003).
This is understandable, because, although some of them have acquired some basic decoding skills (Catts, Fey, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2002), they have not learned many of the skills associated with reading comprehension, including inference skills (Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001). The combination of more demanding academic requirements and their inadequate reading skills contributes to poor academic outcomes for students with LD (Leach, Scarborough, & Rescorla, 2003; Mastropieri, Scruggs, & Graetz, 2003; Wagner et al., 2003).
Further complicating matters is the fact that higher-order skills, such as those involved in reading comprehension, in general, and making inferences, in particular, can be much more difficult to teach students with LD to a point of proficiency than lower-order processes (Fisher, Schumaker, & Deshler, 2002; Swanson, Hoskyns, & Lee, 1999). Making inferences has been defined as the ability to "construct the text base and the mental models that go beyond the information directly articulated in the text" (Snow, 2002, p. 108). The ability to generate inferences is typically tested by asking questions like, "Why did the boy take action like he did?" or "What is the main message of this passage?"
The answers to such question do not appear directly in the text. Instead, the reader is expected to integrate clues in the text with prior knowledge to create an answer. Thus, although the ability to generate inferences may be critical to text comprehension, the generation of an inference in reading is essentially the result of the individual reader's response to the ideas presented in the text; this is somewhat dependent on his/her ability to connect or bridge those ideas with some prior knowledge and with clues provided in text (Pressley, 2000).
To provide a theoretical framework for what happens during inference generation, Kintsch (1998) suggested that during the comprehension process, mental representations are constructed or formed about the information being read in text. When the reader thinks, talks, or writes about these representations, they "undergo integration, which results in a well-structured" (Kintsch, 1998, p. 95) understanding of the text. In the case of drawing inferences from text, Kintsch postulated that various factors (e.g., text features, language skills, and domain knowledge) contribute to comprehension and assist the reader in integrating information into a meaningful structure. When such integration occurs, the reader is able to draw a successful inference related to the text. Also, according to Kintsch, this process may be either automatic (unconscious) or controlled (conscious and strategic).
Research conducted with elementary-level students lends support to Kintsch's theory. For example, some studies have shown that the scores of poor comprehenders on inferential comprehension questions improve when they receive prompts to attend to integrative factors like those highlighted by Kintsch (1998), such as text features and background knowledge (Cain & Oakhill, 1999), and when they are given integrative stimuli (e.g., a descriptive title) along with the passage (Yuill & Joscelyne, 1988). Other research studies in which poor comprehenders have been explicitly taught how to make inferences have focused on teaching students to attend to integrative factors similar to those specified by Kintsch. In each study, students were taught one or some combination of the following skills: activating their background knowledge, making predictions, asking and answering questions, looking for clues in the text, making connections between prior knowledge and information in the passage, and attending to text structure.
Although the results of the studies in this area are somewhat mixed, three studies show positive treatment effects for poor comprehenders (e.g., Dewitz, Carr, & Patberg, 1987; Hansen & Pearson, 1983; Yuill & Jocelyne, 1988). However, none of these studies focused on students with disabilities or on secondary students. The poor comprehenders' average posttest scores on some of the criterion-based tests hovered below the passing range. Furthermore, none of these studies used standardized measures of reading comprehension.
With regard to secondary students, researchers focusing on the use of conscious strategic reading comprehension processes have reported that students with LD can learn to use comprehension strategies that conceivably could contribute to inference generation (Gersten et al., 2001; Swanson et al., 1999). Examples of such comprehension strategies include summarization (Gajria & Salvia, 1992), activating background knowledge and prediction (Afflerbach, 1990), and clarifying (Simmonds, 1992). Other research has shown that secondary students with LD can learn complex reading strategies and that their scores on criterion-based reading comprehension measures can increase as a result of the strategy instruction (see Schumaker & Deshler, 2006, for a review).
Each of the studies in this area has focused on one reading strategy (e.g., self-questioning, visual imagery) that might be related to inference generation. None has addressed inference generation as an outcome measure or has employed a standardized reading test to measure changes in comprehension. Further, no study to date has investigated teaching a comprehensive package of strategies that might be used for generating several types of inferences.
Thus, the purpose of this study was to develop and test the effects of an instructional program designed to teach an inference strategy to secondary students with disabilities. Specifically, the study was designed to examine the effects of explicit instruction in a multi-component inference reading comprehension strategy by assessing (a) student knowledge of the strategy, (b) student use of the strategy while reading narrative passages, (c) student ability to answer four types of inferential questions as well as literal comprehension questions, (d) student scores on a standardized measure of reading comprehension, (e) student reading and strategy satisfaction, and (f) required instructional time for students with disabilities in a secondary setting.
METHOD
Participants
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