The written expression of children with reading disabilities: A comparison of written and dictated narratives

Abstract

There has been extensive research into the area of learning and in particular reading disabilities over the past thirty years. However, despite a significant body of research into the written expression difficulties experienced by children with learning disabilities (LD) in general, very little research has focussed on the written expression ability of children with specific reading disabilities (SRD). This study compared the narrative story writing of 18 students with SRD and 18 typically achieving (TA) students between the ages of 8 and 10 years. Story samples were obtained in response to a standard stimulus using two production modes ‐ handwriting and dictation. The spontaneous writing sub‐tests of the Test of Written Language III (Hammill & Larsen, 1996) were used for assessment and measurement. Measures of fluency, mature vocabulary and story construction were examined for both modes of production. No group differences were found for any of the measures in the dictated production mode, however significant differences were found on measures of fluency and story construction in the handwritten mode. Children with SRD wrote significantly fewer words and scored significantly lower on measures of story construction in comparison to their typically achieving peers. No group differences were found in relation to mature vocabulary usage. Implications for future study and educational practice are identified and discussed.     

Story grammar and comprehension and production of narrative prose by students with learning disabilities

This study investigated both quantitative and qualitative differences between subjects with and without learning disabilities (LD) across three grade levels on two tasks requiring active processing of story grammar. There was no evidence, for either task, of developmental differences in relation to either story comprehension or production. However, there were significant differences between students with LD and normally achieving students in the amount as well as the type of information included in the retellings and written stories. The results provide support for the hypothesis that students with LD have acquired a rudimentary but not fully developed schema for narrative prose.     

EEG analysis of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and comorbid reading disabilities

This study investigated electroencephalographic differences between two groups of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, combined type, with reading disabilities (ADHD + RD) or without (ADHD) and typical control participants. Twenty participants were included in each group. All participants were between the ages of 8 and 12 years, and groups were matched on age and gender. The electroencephalographic (EEG) was recorded during an eyes-closed resting condition from 21 monopolar derivations, which were clustered into nine regions for analysis. The EEGs were Fourier-transformed to provide absolute and relative power estimates for the delta, theta, alpha, and beta bands. Ratio coefficients were also calculated for the theta/alpha and theta/beta ratios. Compared with controls, the clinical groups demonstrated the increased slow-wave and reduced fast-wave activity commonly reported in the ADHD literature. The ADHD + RD group had more relative theta, less relative alpha, and a higher theta/alpha ratio than the ADHD group. A number of hemispheric differences were also found in the delta and alpha bands. These results suggested that some of the EEG divergences found in the ADHD + RD group represent an electrophysiological component associated with the reading disability that is independent of the EEG divergences found in ADHD.     

Comparison of visual-spatial performance strategy training in children with Turner syndrome and learning disabilities.

This study examined the effects of a verbal mediation strategy on three groups of subjects who had visual-spatial deficits. Thirteen females with Turner syndrome, 13 females with nonverbal learning disabilities, and 14 males with nonverbal learning disabilities, who ranged in age from 7 to 14 years, were taught via a cognitive behavioral modification approach to verbally mediate a spatial matching task. Pretest and posttest performance differences on parallel forms of a visual-spatial orientation task were examined. All three groups showed significant improvement in visual-spatial task performance after the training. There were no significant differences in the degree of improvement among the three groups. The results suggest that children with Turner syndrome may benefit from problem-solving strategy training in a manner similar to children with nonverbal learning disabilities.     

Personal Narratives of Students With and Without Learning Disabilities

This study investigated personal narratives produced by children with and without learning disabilities in the context of naturalistic conversation. The high‐point analysis was applied to compare the referential and evaluative aspects of children's personal narratives. Participants were 60 students in Grades 4 and 5 in public suburban schools, with an almost equal number of boys and girls. The participants with learning disabilities were matched individually with typically achieving peers for chronological age, grade, ethnicity, and gender. Despite significant differences in expressive semantic and syntactic skills, both groups produced narratives that were equivalent in terms of length, structural organization, and global coherence. Group differences centered around the decreased inclusion of high points in narratives produced by girls with learning disabilities, indicating that these girls may struggle with generating coherent personal narratives and communicating their own perspective on the recounted personal experiences. This specific narrative performance is accounted for by the unique profile of cognitive and academic characteristics demonstrated by girls with learning disabilities. Practical implications for the multifaceted assessment of referential and evaluative narrative functions are discussed, and interventions for enhancing narrative skills are suggested. The study's findings are also discussed in the context of previous research and directions for future inquiries.     

Spelling rule usage among students with learning disabilities and normally achieving students

Spelling performance of students with learning disabilities (LD) was compared with that of same-age normally achieving subjects and younger normally achieving subjects. Subjects with learning disabilities were divided into two groups: poor readers/poor spellers and good readers/poor spellers. A spelling battery was administered that included one task of phoneme-grapheme correspondence rule usage and four tasks of suffix rule usage. The groups with learning disabilities performed significantly below the same-age normally achieving group on all tasks. No significant differences among the two groups with learning disabilities and their achievement-level peers emerged in primary analyses. However, secondary analyses revealed differences in mastery of the past tense spelling rule ed, and in some subskills related to the spelling of words with suffixes. The cognitive-linguistic significance of these results is discussed.     

Locus of control of children with learning disabilities and perceived locus of control by significant others

The perceptions of parents and teachers of 24 children with learning disabilities regarding their children's or students' locus of control (LC) orientation were compared to the LC orientation held by the children themselves. While no significant differences were found between parents and children, teachers were found to perceive in their students with learning disabilities significantly more internally oriented success experiences than the students perceived in themselves. Significant differences in LC orientation were also found between the children with learning disabilities and a comparable group of nondisabled subjects. Implications for both preservice and inservice teacher education are presented.     

Processing Narratives for Verbatim and Gist Information by Adults with Language Learning Disabilities: A Functional Neuroimaging Study

How verbal information is processed and recalled appears to be influenced by the structure of the information presented (e.g., unrelated sentences vs. narratives) and the processes the listener uses to encode the information (e.g., verbatim encoding vs. gist extraction). Twenty adults, half with a history of learning disabilities (HLD) and half without (control group) received functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. Participants were instructed to listen to narrative passages for either the exact wording or the general meaning of the narratives and respond to questions about the narratives. These conditions were contrasted with listening to randomly arranged sentences. Adults in the HLD group responded to test questions less accurately than the control group. Likewise, the HLD group showed physiological differences during both narrative and sentence processing in comparison to the control group. Both groups showed differences in processing narratives for gist versus verbatim information, which involved activation centered over the right precentral sulcus. The results support the notion that distinct aspects of verbal processing draw differentially on a distributed physiological network and that adults selected for HLD show both behavioral and physiological differences on narrative processing tasks. However, these differences are not necessarily qualitative in nature.     

Metaphoric competence in children with learning disabilities

Metaphoric competence was examined in two groups of children with learning disabilities and one group of nondisabled peers ranging in age from 9-0 to 11-0 years. There were five girls and seven boys in each group. One group of students with learning disabilities had a history of spoken language impairment and the other group did not. Subjects were administered three verbal metaphor tasks (comprehension, preference, and completion) and a visual metaphor task, the Metaphor Triads Task (MTT). The three verbal metaphor tasks were administered in three contexts: (a) sentence, (b) story, and (c) story plus visual (pictorial) support. The group with a history of language impairment consistently performed more poorly on the metaphor tasks than the group without a history of language impairment, who, in turn, performed more poorly than the nondisabled children on all but the MTT. Context variations had no effect on children's performance. Theoretical and clinical implications will be discussed.     

Classroom behavior of children and adolescents with learning disabilities: a meta-analysis

Meta-analysis was used to review the results of 25 studies that compared the classroom behavior of children and adolescents with learning disabilities (LD) to children without learning disabilities. The data were analyzed from several different methodological perspectives. Results showed that both methodologically strong and weak studies demonstrated significant behavioral deficits of children with learning disabilities compared to their nondisabled peers in each of five overall areas: on-task behavior, off-task behavior, conduct disorders, distractibility, and shy/withdrawn behavior. Both observational and teacher rating data demonstrated these differences. Effect sizes for both groups of studies seemed to cluster around 1 standard deviation, suggesting noticeable and educationally significant impairment in the behavior of children with disabilities. Analysis of grade-level effect sizes suggests some explanation for the large number of referrals often witnessed during the elementary school years. Educational implications of these behavioral differences in terms of implications for mainstreaming are discussed.     

Neuropsychological profiles of children with learning disabilities and children with documented brain damage

This study sought to identify clusters or subtypes of children with learning disabilities (LD) and documented brain damage (BD) on the basis of a comprehensive neuropsychological battery. Sixty subjects, 24 with LD and 36 with BD, participated in the study. The standard scores for several measures from the Intermediate Battery of the Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Battery and other select measures were submitted to Q-Technique factor analysis for the entire sample. Five clusters were determined. No one cluster was composed exclusively of LD or BD subjects, with the proportions of LD and BD varying considerably from one cluster to the next. There were some qualitative differences between the clusters, while quantitative differences also figured prominently.     

Conversational engagement of children with learning disabilities

This study was designed to characterize the conversational engagement techniques employed by children with and without learning disabilities while in a dyadic interaction. Engagement was defined and measured in terms of the degree to which utterances provided information and evidenced responsiveness to one's conversational partner. Sixty (30 with learning disabilities and 30 nondisabled) 9- to 13-year-old subjects participated. Analyses indicated that the subjects with learning disabilities (LD) could and did employ engagement-related techniques similar in levels of sophistication to those of their nondisabled peers, although they did so less consistently and frequently. Further, the relationship between affective measures and the engagement-related techniques used by the subjects with LD differed markedly from those of the nondisabled subjects. The results are interpreted from a motivational standpoint and suggest that future research should focus on the knowledge and application of engagement-related techniques of the children with LD, across settings and conversational partners.     

Narratives: A window on the oral substrate of written language disabilities

Oral precursors underlying competence with literacy activities are approached through a review of studies on narrative comprehension and production in children identified as language learning disabled (LLD). Areas addressed include a general overview of narrative types, the kinds of narrative knowledge that are acquired, the nature of story organization, and developmental acquisitions in story recall and generation. Nine studies on the oral comprehension and production of language learning disabled children are then compared with respect to methodological issues and patterns of performance. Implications from these studies are discussed in terms of their potential insight for subtypes of a LLD including the value of oral narratives in identifying precursors for competence with written language.     

Mathematical problem-solving profiles of students with mathematics disabilities with and without comorbid reading disabilities

The purpose of this study was to describe the mathematical problem-solving profiles of students with mathematics disabilities (MD) with and without comorbid reading disabilities (RD). The disability status of fourth-grade students was verified through testing (n = 18 MD; n = 22 MD + RD). Then a hierarchy of mathematics problem-solving tasks was administered. The results demonstrated large deficits for both groups; however, the differences between students with MD and those with MD + RD were mediated by the level of problem solving (arithmetic story problems vs. complex story problems vs. real-world problem solving) and by performance dimension (operations vs. problem solving). On arithmetic story problems, the differences between the disability subtypes were similar for operations and problem solving. By contrast, on complex story problems and real-world problem solving, the differences between the subtypes were larger for problem solving than for operations.     

Metacognitive skills in Belgian third grade children (age 8 to 9) with and without mathematical learning disabilities

This paper presents a study on mathematical problem solving in third-grade pupils. The relationship between mathematics, metacognition and intelligence was investigated in children with (n = 191) and without mathematical learning disabilities (n = 268). A significant relationship was found between prediction, evaluation, intelligence, procedural and mathematical fact retrieval skills in children without mathematical learning disabilities. In the children with mathematical learning disabilities a relationship was found between metacognitive and procedural skills. No such relationship was found between intelligence and metacognition or between metacognition and mathematical fact retrieval skills. In addition it was investigated if children with mathematical learning disabilities had less adequate metacognitive skills than peers without learning problems. At group level significant differences were found between both groups. However on analyzing these results further, it was found that four out of five children with combined mathematical learning disabilities, half of the children with procedural disabilities and only 5% of the children with a retrieval deficiency had low metacognitive skills. Furthermore, metacognitive problems were found in one out of five children without learning disabilities. Moreover, a majority of the children with mathematical learning disabilities and inadequate metacognitive skills had problems with prediction and evaluation skills. Most third graders with low metacognitive skills only appeared to have problems predicting the level of difficulty of tasks. Inaccurate evaluations were found on a more regular basis in children with mathematical learning disabilities and inadequate metacognitive skills as opposed to the sample of children with inadequate metacognitive skills but without learning difficulties, where their occurrence was rather a one off. The implications of this study for diagnosis and treatment will be discussed later in this paper.     

Hemispheric specialization and the language abilities of autistic children

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between patterns of hemispheric specialization for speech processing and language ability in autistic children. 17 male autistic children, 6-18 years of age, and 17 normal children, matched for chronological age and gender, were tested. Measures of hemispheric asymmetry were differences in the averaged cortical evoked responses taken from right and left hemisphere scalp locations to linguistic and nonlinguistic auditory stimuli. A comprehensive battery of language tests was administered to autistic subjects. Autistic children's direction of hemispheric asymmetry in response to linguistic stimuli differed significantly from that of normal subjects. The majority of autistic subjects showed reversed (right hemisphere dominant), but not necessarily reduced, patterns of hemispheric asymmetry. Autistic children with more advanced language abilities were more likely to exhibit a normal direction of hemispheric asymmetry. The possibility that a shift from right to left hemisphere processing of speech occurs as the autistic child acquires spoken language is discussed.     

Learning difficulties and social class: exploring the intersection through family narratives

This article is concerned with the intersection between learning difficulties and social class. It also inevitably tells of the gender‐class interface in relation to women’s caring roles. I use the life story narratives of three mothers and a grandmother of a person with learning difficulties, together with concepts from Bourdieu, to explore the ways in which class‐related capital and habitus affect their life experiences and their interactions with educational and other professionals. The data are the stories of (grand)mothers reflecting on life events, particularly in relation to decision making surrounding education, while simultaneously providing subtle, rich pictures of their socio‐economic contexts. I illustrate how privilege and disadvantage are reproduced partly for the families through their institutional interactions, which are differentiated according to economic and social resources. The stories re‐presented in this paper provide powerful examples of how experiences of living with learning difficulties and disabilities are situated in one’s class position and how struggles for inclusion are at once common and particular.     

Interpretation of emotion from facial expressions in children with and without learning disabilities

The accuracy and time required for children with and without learning disabilities to interpret emotions when restricted to information from facial expressions, and the accuracy of those interpretations, were investigated. Ninety-six children participated; an equal number of males and females were included in both learning categories and age levels. Accuracy and response time on a modified version of Pictures of Facial Affect were recorded for the emotions of fear, sadness, surprise, anger, happiness, and disgust, as well as for the entire task. Three-way ANOVAs revealed children with learning disabilities to (a) be less accurate interpreters of emotion and (b) spend more time identifying specific emotions. Both age and sex influenced response time: Younger subjects required more time to interpret the emotions of fear and anger; males spent more time interpreting happiness. Younger females with learning disabilities displayed difficulty in interpretation, and older children with learning disabilities (particularly males) were rapid, but often inaccurate, interpreters of emotion.     

Dickens for All: Inclusive Approaches to Literature and Communication with People with Severe and Profound Learning Disabilities

Keith Park, a teacher of children with visual impairment and learning disabilities with the Greenwich Visual Impairment Service, describes a series of multisensory interactive drama games re-telling the story of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, following a discussion of the potential uses of literature with people with severe and profound learning disabilities.