Michael F. Hock

Ensuring Content-Area Learning by Secondary Students with Learning Disabilities.

Three factors tied with secondary student success in content-area reading are demonstrated: (a) validated teacher-focused and student-focused interventions, (b) integrated and comprehensive service delivery systems, and (c) well-designed, data-based professional developmental programs. Difficult challenges face secondary students with LD and their teachers with regard to these students’ participation and success in required general education classes. Recently, instructional methods and materials have been developed and validated for promoting these students’ success. Some of them focus on how general education teachers plan and teach their content-area courses; others focus on giving students the strategies they need to respond independently to the demands of their courses. This article describes these instructional methods, a service-delivery model for implementing these interventions in secondary schools, and professional-development mechanisms and administrative support that must be in place for the model to be maintained effectively.

What Is the Reading Component Skill Profile of Adolescent Struggling Readers in Urban Schools

The purpose of this descriptive study was to examine the component reading skills of adolescent struggling readers attending urban high schools. Specifically, 11 measures of reading skills were administered to 345 adolescent readers to gain a research-based perspective on the reading skill profile of this population. Participants were assessed in the domains of word level, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Analysis of the results found that 61% of the struggling adolescent readers had significant deficits in all of the reading components listed above. Subgroups of struggling readers showed similar but more severe patterns. For example, students with learning disabilities scored significantly below the levels of the struggling reader group at large. In contrast, most proficient readers scored high on all measures of reading with above-average component reading skills in word level, vocabulary, and comprehension. The lowest skill area for the proficient reader group was fluency, where they scored at the average level. Implications for policy and instructional programming are discussed.

The Effects of an After-School Tutoring Program on the Academic Performance of At-Risk Students and Students with LD

Improving the educational outcomes for students who are at risk for academic failure is an important issue for educators and policymakers. Recently, before- and after-school tutoring programs have been identified as having the potential to turn academic failure into academic success. Two studies were conducted to determine the efficacy of an after-school tutoring program. Results of the studies showed that at-risk students and students with learning disabilities who were failing classes could earn average or better grades on quizzes and tests if they had the support of trained adult tutors. Additionally, researchers found that tutors could teach strategies during their tutoring sessions and that students could learn the strategies while they worked on their class assignments. Finally, researchers found that some students continued to be successful after tutoring ended, indicating that they were able to use the strategy they had learned in a generative fashion.

Tutoring Programs for Academically Underprepared College Students: A Review of the Literature

Orchestrating the success of underprepared college students is a major area of focus for many post-secondary learning institutions. One-to-one tutoring is the support service most often provided to these students. However, the effectiveness of tutoring as an intervention is controversial. Some see tutoring as supportive of student learning. Others see tutoring as ineffective, inefficient, and even harmful. Still others report that tutoring works under certain conditions but not under other conditions or with specific populations of students. This literature review was designed to critically review the research on college tutoring practices and clarify the efficacy issue and outcomes related to college tutoring programs.

Efficacy of Learning Strategies Instruction in Adult Basic Education

Abstract Results from randomized controlled trials of learning strategies instruction with 375 adult basic education participants are reported. Reading outcomes from whole group strategic instruction in 1 of 4 learning strategies were compared to outcomes of reading instruction delivered in the context of typical adult education units on social studies, history, and science. Both experimental and control conditions experienced high attrition and low attendance, resulting in only 105 control and 100 experimental participants’ data in outcome analyses for the trials of the 4 learning strategies. Reading outcomes for these completers were not significantly different between experimental and control conditions, and each group achieved minimal gains. We discuss possible reasons for the nonsignificant effect from the intervention, including insufficient instructional dosage.

Reading strategy interventions: Can literacy outcomes be enhanced for at-risk adolescents?

Many students are entering secondary school reading at levels that are significantly below grade level. In some secondary schools, these students constitute the large majority of the population. A cross-sectional study that involved hundreds of junior and senior high students was conducted by researchers at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning (KUCRL) and revealed an interesting phenomenon related to these students (Warner, Schumaker, Alley, & Deshler, 1980). As shown in Figure 1, the reading achievement of at-risk students and students with high-incidence disabilities, like learning disabilities, plateaus after the seventh grade. The straight, solid line in this figure represents the path of “normal” acquisition of reading skills by average-achieving students. That is, at the conclusion of 1 year of instruction, on average, students should have acquired “1-year’s worth” of knowledge and skills as represented by Point A on that line. At the end of the second year, they should be performing at the level of Point B, and so on. Students who acquire skills and knowledge at this pace are, in turn, able to successfully deal with the curriculum demands that are presented to them. In other words, they can successfully “access the curriculum” and succeed in their courses. On the other hand, the reading performance of students with disabilities and at-risk students (students who are failing at least one required course each semester) usually does not follow this line of progress. On average, these students perform at the level of Point A1 at the end of 1 year of schooling, and their achievement travels a path similar to the one depicted by the two dotted curved lines, with at-risk students earning slightly higher reading achievement scores than the students with disabilities. The area between the solid line (representing normal achievement) and the dotted lines (representing underachievement) depicts the “performance gap” for each group of students. This represents the gap between what students are expected to achieve and perform in their classes and what they can actually do. Over time, this gap grows larger and larger, and it is especially exacerbated in the later grades when the academic growth of students with disabilities plateaus. As a result of this performance gap, these students are unable to “access the general education curriculum” and meet the demands of required courses for graduation from high school. Their resulting failure leads to discouragement and disengagement from school, and, for too many, this disengagement manifests itself in dropping out of school altogether. The challenge, then, is to intervene with these students in a significant way so that they can read at their grade level (e.g., if they are in the ninth grade, they read at the ninth-grade level), learn critical information in their required courses, earn passing grades in these courses, graduate, and participate successfully in postsecondary education or employment opportunities. Reading Strategy Interventions: Can Literacy Outcomes Be Enhanced for At-Risk Adolescents?

Effective Literacy Instruction for Adults With Specific Learning Disabilities: Implications for Adult Educators

Adults with learning disabilities (LD) attending adult basic education, GED programs, or community colleges are among the lowest performers on measures of literacy. For example, on multiple measures of reading comprehension, adults with LD had a mean reading score at the third grade level, whereas adults without LD read at the fifth grade level. In addition, large numbers of adults perform at the lowest skill levels on quantitative tasks. Clearly, significant instructional challenges exist for adults who struggle with literacy issues, and those challenges can be greater for adults with LD. In this article, the literature on adults with LD is reviewed, and evidenced-based instructional practices that significantly narrow the literacy achievement gap for this population are identified. Primary attention is given to instructional factors that have been shown to affect literacy outcomes for adults with LD. These factors include the use of explicit instruction, instructional technology, and intensive tutoring in skills and strategies embedded in authentic contexts.

The Effects of a Comprehensive Reading Program on Reading Outcomes for Middle School Students With Disabilities

Reading achievement scores for adolescents with disabilities are markedly lower than the scores of adolescents without disabilities. For example, 62% of students with disabilities read below the basic level on the NAEP Reading assessment, compared to 19% of their nondisabled peers. This achievement gap has been a continuing challenge for more than 35 years. In this article, we report on the promise of a comprehensive 2-year reading program called Fusion Reading. Fusion Reading is designed to significantly narrow the reading achievement gap of middle school students with reading disabilities. Using a quasi-experimental design with matched groups of middle school students with reading disabilities, statistically significant differences were found between the experimental and comparison conditions on multiple measures of reading achievement with scores favoring the experimental condition. The effect size of the differences were Hedges’s g = 1.66 to g = 1.04 on standardized measures of reading achievement.

The Strategic Instruction Model: The Less Addressed Aspects of Effective Instruction for High School Students with Learning Disabilities

In this article, we discuss research supporting the Strategic Instruction Models™ (SIM) effort to address higher order reasoning and thinking skills in two lines of programmatic research. We review the extant body of evidence supporting the two lines of the SIM library, the Content Enhancement Routines and a comprehensive reading program, and the impact that the materials have on high school students with learning disabilities (LD). This body of research includes studies utilizing multiple research designs including randomized control trials, single case multiplebaseline, quasi-experimental comparison group, single group, and descriptive data analysis. We have included studies that have been conducted with a SIM comprehensive reading program and instructional routines that reflect higher order thinking. These studies provide support for the positive impact the interventions have on high school students with LD.

Reading Comprehension Instruction for Middle and High School Students in English Language Arts: Research and Evidence-Based Practices

Whether driven by individual state or national efforts, the desire by key stakeholder groups to make American students internationally competitive brings a renewed focus on reading comprehension instruction in middle and high schools. Such efforts push reading comprehension instruction beyond understanding text and the author’s message to critical or “close” reading that integrates text-based information with the reader’s prior knowledge resulting in new and expanded understanding of complex ideas. In order to ensure that students become proficient in the type of higher order comprehension expected by more rigorous standards, teachers need to be effective in teaching high impact reading comprehension strategies. In this chapter, we briefly highlight new expectations for English language arts at the middle and high school levels, review reading programs shown to be effective in rigorous research studies that measure reading comprehension or reading achievement outcomes with middle and high school students in core English language arts courses. Finally, we discuss specific reading strategies and vocabulary instruction that support close reading and suggest a model for teaching reading comprehension in middle and high schools.