The Effectiveness of Textbook Adaptations in Life Science for High School Students with Learning Disabilities

Abstract

Secondary students with learning disabilities are at a disadvantage in science classes because they have difficulty reading and acquiring information from textbooks. One way to help those students is to adapt textbook passages to make them easier to comprehend. This article reports the findings of a study exploring the effectiveness of two types of textbook adaptations—graphics and study guides—compared to self-study. The results indicated that graphics helped secondary, life science students achieve significantly better scores on multiple-choice tests than either study guides or self-study. No significant differences were found between the scores for study guides and self-study.