The focus of this study was the testing of the Conceptual Level Matching Model with a population of learning disabled (LD) children. The students selected for use in this study consisted of an equal number of students in the high and low CL groups ranging between 13 and 15 years of age.The final sample included 35 males and five females whose IQ's ranged between 80 and 117. These students were attending public school special education LD resource rooms in Anderson, Indiana. The students, selected on the basis of their chronological age, were divided into two groups according to their score on the Paragraph Completion Test. Thus, comparisons were observed among and between the two experimental groups. A statistical analysis of those attributes on which the students were grouped revealed no significant differences between groups on measures of chronological age, full scale IQ and reading comprehension scores.The results were generated from the administration of the Paragraph Completion Test (PCT) and the Analytical Reading Inventory (ARI). The PCT was used to assign students to either the high or low group who were in turn randomly assigned to either the structured or unstructured group to form the final four experimental groups. All students were then administered three graded paragraphs from the ARI; intended to measure their level of reading comprehension. T-tests were initially used to test for significant differences between the two groups in terms of chronological age, IQ, and reading comprehension scores. A two-way factorial analysis of variance was used to test differences between means for the four experimental groups. The hypothesis predicting a significant difference between the two main groups on the ARI was supported by the data. It was concluded that LD students high in conceptual level (CL) can be expected to perform significantly better than low CL students on a reading comprehension task.A significant difference was also shown between the low CL group taught in a highly structured fashion and the low CL group taught in an unstructured fashion; with the structured group performing significantly better. However, the third hypothesis which predicted that the high CL group taught in an unstructured fashion would perform better than the high CL group taught in a structured fashion was not supported by the data. In fact the results showed a trend in the opposite direction, with the high CL group-structured performing better than the high CL group-unstructured.The data also supported the hypothesis that the high CL group would perform significantly better on the cause and effect, inferential, and conclusion reading comprehension questions on the ARI than the low CL group. However, these results should be interpreted with caution because of the high level of overall significance between the high and low CL groups. Therefore, these results may not be a reflection of the type of question asked but of the overall superiority of the high CL group.Recommended avenues of investigation for future research is cited as follows: (a) replication of the study with equal numbers of females to permit greater generalization of the results; (b) evaluation of the CL of LD teachers to see if they prefer to teach in a highly structured fashion which is consistent with the way low CL students prefer to learn; (c) structuring an LD student's learning environment on a long term basis; (d) study of the environment that would allow LD students low in CL to move to the next higher stage of development; and (e) development of an instrument that can be used to measure the CL of younger children.

An important question in the field of reading development is whether models of reading, which apply largely to monolingual English (L1) learners, also apply to English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. The pursuit of such an inquiry is critical to the development of empirically valid models of reading in ESL populations. This study investigated the nature and determinants of the developmental pathways of reading comprehension in ESL (N=153) and L1 learners (N=593) from the fourth to the seventh grade. Two research questions guided the research: (1) How similar are ESL learners to L1 learners in their reading comprehension growth trajectories? (2) How similar are ESL learners to L1 learners in the determinants of their reading comprehension growth trajectories? The following basic processes of reading comprehension were examined: phonological awareness, pseudoword decoding, word identification, reading fluency, and syntactic awareness. Using latent growth modeling, the study found that ESL learners were identical to L1 learners in the functional form (both showed linear growth), slope or rate of growth, intra-individual variability, and linguistic determinants, of their reading comprehension growth trajectories. However, they were weaker than L1 learners in their reading comprehension skill levels. These results provide compelling support for the applicability of L1 models of reading comprehension for ESL learners, and help shape an emergent conceptualization of reading comprehension development for ESL learners.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Lehigh University, 2000. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 2009. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 101 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-89).

Thesis (EdD.)--Open University.

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Communication Disorders, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-73).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2003. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-101).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2004. / Thesis directed by Darcia Narvaez for the Department of Psychology. "April 2004." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 102-108).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-92).

This experimental study was conducted to examine the effectiveness of multicomponent reading intervention and a no treatment comparison condition on the reading comprehension of adolescent students with adequate word reading and low reading comprehension. The sample consisted of 44 students in 9th grade who were randomly assigned to an intervention treatment offered as an elective course (N=25) or a no treatment comparison (N=19). Reading intervention teachers, trained by experienced research staff provided instruction for 90-min sessions two to three times per week during for approximately 80 sessions. Treatment effects for each outcome measure were estimated using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). Results indicate no statistically significant differences between conditions. Effects, which were calculated with partial eta squared (η2), ranged from -.26 to .23 with two of the three measures favoring the treatment condition. Three separate repeated measure of analysis of variance (RM-ANCOVAs) were conducted using the Kaufmann Brief Intelligence Test (KBIT) as a covariate for the following measures: (1) Woodcock Johnson Passage Comprehension subtest (WJIII-PC); (2) Test of Sentence Reading Efficiency (TOSRE); (3) Gates MacGinitie Reading test (GM-RT). An additional ANCOVA was conducted for the GM-RT using the pretest scores from the GM-RT as a covariate. Results indicate that the treatment condition was not favorable to a no treatment comparison for students with adequate word reading and low comprehension. More research into ways to make reading comprehension instruction more effective for Adolescent students with low reading comprehension is warranted. / text