Free Recall as a Test of Reading Comprehension for Students with Learning Disabilities

Free recall is commonly used to assess reading comprehension in research studies and school practices. Students with learning disabilities (LD) perform less well on recall measures than their nonLD peers. However, memory or expressive language requirements of recall tasks may affect the ability of students with LD to show their understanding of passages. An exploratory investigation was designed to determine whether sixth- and eighth-grade students with LD attending general education science classes performed less well than their nonLD peers on recall of science passages, when differences in passage understanding and domain vocabulary were controlled. The results showed that this was the case. Productivity and recall of main ideas were explored as possible reasons for difficulty with recall tasks. The groups did not differ in productivity, but the sixth and eighth graders with LD were less able to understand and use idea structure for purposes of remembering passage information than their nonLD peers. The results suggest that task requirements of recall measures may pose particular problems for students with LD.