Content-Specific and General Reading Disabilities of Secondary-Level Students

Abstract

The purposes of this study were (a) to examine the diagnostic utility of reading from text for distinguishing students with general reading disabilities from those whose reading deficits are related to background knowledge in specific content areas, and (b) to establish the educational utility of these two subgroups. Participants were 121 students (71 male and 50 female) in the 10th grade who were participating in a larger study to examine the contribution of reading to the academic success of secondary students. Students first completed a background-knowledge vocabulary test. Then they read aloud from English and science texts, studied and answered multiple-choice questions based on the selected texts, and finally read aloud from the texts again. The discrepancy between student performance in reading aloud from the prestudy English and science texts was utilized to formulate two subgroups: students with general reading deficits defined by low reading scores in both English and science, and students with content-specific deficits defined by reading scores in English that were substantially higher than in science. Results of the discrepancy analysis yielded a group of 33 students with general deficits and 6 students with content-specific deficits. To examine the educational utility of these groups, content-specific and matched general-deficit groups were compared on their poststudy reading performances of the science passage. Poststudy reading scores for the content-specific group were significantly higher than for the general-deficit group, suggesting that students in the content-specific group benefited more from study of the text than did students in the general-deficit group. Additional analyses supported the hypothesis that the content-specific deficits were due to a lack of background knowledge. Results lend support to the possibility that reading from text can be used by teachers as a diagnostic tool to identify educationally relevant subtypes of students with learning difficulties in the content areas.