Cognitive Strategy Instruction for Improving Expository Text Comprehension of Students with Learning Disabilities: The Quality of Evidence (Report‪)‬

Skilled reading is "the ability to derive meaning from text accurately and efficiently" (McCardle, Scarborough, & Catts, 2001, p. 230). Becoming a skilled reader requires both the ability to recognize words (i.e., focusing on such skills as phonological awareness, the alphabetic principle, decoding, and fluency) and the ability to comprehend text (McCardle et al., 2001). Although instruction in word recognition is critical for students with reading difficulties, some students continue to struggle with comprehending or acquiring knowledge from text despite having adequate word-recognition skills (Klingner & Vaughn, 1996). These students experience greater difficulty in the upper elementary grades, when the focus shifts from learning to read to reading to learn. Specifically, they have problems finding the main ideas and important supporting details, making predictions, drawing inferences, and summarizing information (Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001). Textbooks and instructional materials in later grades often consist primarily of expository text that is more difficult to comprehend than narrative text for all students, especially for those with learning disabilities (Williams, 2005). Expository and narrative texts are two distinct genres of text structure that differ with regard to the "underlying principles of organization--schema-based in narratives and category-based in exposition" (Berman, 2007, p. 79). Another basic distinction between expository and narrative texts has to do with the purpose (Fox, 2009): "the main focus of narrative texts is to tell a story, so that the reader will be entertained," whereas "the main focus of expository texts is to communicate information so that the reader might learn something" (Weaver & Kintsch, 1991/1996, p. 230).