Gortmaker, Valerie J;daly, Edward J,

Gortmaker, Valerie J;Daly, Edward J, III;McCurdy, Merilee;Persampieri, Michael J;Hergenrader, Melani "Improving Reading Outcomes for Children with Learning Disabilities. "Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis; Summer 2007; 40, 2; ProQuest Central pg. 203.

Children with learning disabilities often find it difficult to pick up basic skills both during the school year and during the summer. While nearly all children suffer from a lack of motivation and a marked decrease in reading ability and in competency in subjects such as math, spelling, and reading comprehension during the summer, parents of disabled children can help to increase their child's skill sets buy tutoring them over the summer and giving them reading assignments and tasks which can be empirically analyzed. However, different interventions affect these children differently, and parents often need to be led in the right direction as to which ones will likely benefit their children, depending on their individual needs.

Many children respond well to a summer reading program designed to reinforce and increase HWO (high-word-overlap). Thought these programs are more difficult to analyze empirically, they have shown to be effective. Also, children who have been enrolled in programs that are more comprehensive in nature, tis is to say they cover more than just reading, have also shown marked improvement during the summer months, yet these programs, when analyzed, need to be broken down into their components to be more accurately analyzed.

One of the weaknesses of summer reading interventions is the fact that generalized improvements and results are difficult to obtain. This means that many of the results, though consistent from year to year in the larger population, are idiosyncratic. However, the researchers found the best results came when the intervention focused on two separate goals for the learner. The first goal was to learn and normalize new words into the child's working vocabulary. This gives them the opportunity for new learning and the chance to change the relevance of the newly learned words so that they can use them in everyday life. Second, the children must also be motivated and enabled to learn new words, outside of their new vocabulary, in order to make new connections that take place outside of their learning element. This can occur outside the home or outside the learning intervention. Scientists have found these two goals reinforce each other and help to give the student a better handle on the learning that is taking place while, at the same time, giving them new tools to help motivate them to explore the world around them.

While it is important to understand that the selection of the reading material and motivators need to be empirical, they also need to be specific to each student. This means that the results of the case study, though obviously idiosyncratic, are predictably so given each student's varying aptitude and motivation levels coupled with differing parental efforts. However, parents and researchers rated the LWO and HWO models effectively, which helps to show that students who follow the above mentioned two-pronged approach were more likely to improve their learning over the summer.

This case study also showed that parent tutoring helped to increase student reading fluency rates and allowed them to perform better during the upcoming school year. Interestingly enough, student fluency rates did not improve as much during the school year as they did over the summer, suggesting that focusing on reading during a time when students were already at a huge disadvantage in retention of new learning and reading (summer months, even for normal children), resulted in more improvement than had been normally seen in an entire school year.

In order to reinforce these results, parents were advised to continue tutoring programs as well s positively reinforce the learning and goal seeking that takes place both over the summer and during the school year. It is also important to create EO's (establishing operations) throughout the school year that help to reinforce the student's learning goals and maintain motivation. The research showed as well that students who did not continue their tutoring showed a marked decrease in their reading skills and comprehension immediately after being removed from such a program.