Learning Disabilities Practice
Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 17(1), 65–77
C 2002, The Division for Learning Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children
Copyright Procedural Facilitators and Cognitive Strategies: Tools
for Unraveling the Mysteries of Comprehension and
the Writing Process, and for Providing Meaningful
Access to the General Curriculum
Scott Baker and Russell Gersten
University of Oregon/ERI
David Scanlon
Boston College
Abstract. A solid, emerging research base exists to
inform how we provide meaningful access to the general education curriculum for students with learning
disabilities (LD). For example, the presentation of challenging content to academically diverse learners can be
demystified using content enhancement techniques. Additionally, a range of strategies can be taught to enhance
reading comprehension and expressive writing abilities.
Examples from several lines of research in comprehension and writing are used to highlight the underlying
features of these empirically based approaches and to
introduce the reader to the history of this expanding
body of research.
The Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP)
recently conducted a nationwide consumer survey for
its IDEA National Program Planning (Office of Special Education, 2000). Over 14,000 individuals with
disabilities, parents, service providers, administrators,
and policymakers responded to the survey, which asked
them to select five areas they believed would have the
greatest impact on improving the lives of children with
disabilities. The top choice, chosen by 51 percent of
respondents, was better access to the general education
curriculum.
In a related activity, the second author conducted a
series of focus group interviews with a diverse group
Requests for reprints should be sent to Scott K. Baker, Eugene
Research Institute, 132 E. Broadway, Suite 747, Eugene, OR 97401.
of stakeholders in the educational system. The participants’ most salient concerns focused on ways to help
students transfer material learned in school to day-today tasks, or, to paraphrase one parent, helping students
understand “how the pieces fit together and could be
used.” These concerns mirror the national survey’s finding in that discussions centered on school processes and
outcomes. Both groups were similarly concerned with
“access.” However, the focus groups spoke to a more
complex and refined concept of access that included
meaningful participation and adequate progress.
In response to the findings of the nationwide survey,
OSEP assembled a panel of researchers, special educators, and family members of individuals with disabilities
(Office of Special Education, 2000). The charge of the
panel was to articulate issues and unresolved tensions in
the concept of access to the general education curriculum. A number of issues they addressed provide background for this paper. At the broadest level, the panel
concluded that a better definition of curriculum access
would underscore that “access” was not only about students with disabilities being allowed to take challenging
classes, but about students with disabilities having a real
opportunity to successfully learn challenging content.
The panel similarly emphasized that working to attain fundamental skills in reading and mathematics
could not be ignored. In fact, because meaningful access is only enhanced when students have strong skills
in the “basics,” they stressed the importance of rigorously addressing fundamental skills. To achieve the
right balance between integration of academic skill
development, remediation, and meaningful access to
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challenging content, the panel agreed that a candid discussion among policymakers and educators should occur. Topics of this discussion should include instruction
in inclusive settings and special education classrooms
and address the role special education teachers should
play in these settings.
One of the most critical aspects of the panel’s report was the discussion of the research base regarding
how to best teach challenging content to students with
disabilities. There was strong agreement that more research needs to be conducted on the development and
validation of teaching and learning strategies that promote the acquisition, transfer, and real-world use of important skills and knowledge. Research on the types of
learning environments that promote the effective use
of more sophisticated strategies was also identified as
badly needed (Office of Special Education, 2000).
There was strong agreement that a substantial body
of knowledge on research-based practices currently exists and should be used in teaching challenging curriculum content to students with disabilities. The panel felt
that both general and special education teachers drastically underutilize this knowledge base. Furthermore,
this knowledge is more fully developed in some areas
than others. For example, much more is known about
effectively teaching for acquisition than is known about
teaching for transfer. The scientific knowledge base on
the teaching of fundamentals is more advanced than the
knowledge base on teaching specific content. And more
is known about teaching both fundamentals and content
at the primary level than at the secondary level. Despite
a relative paucity of research-based practices on teaching content-area material, advances have been made in
this area too, and should be used to form foundations
for current teaching and further research.
The purpose of this paper is to discuss research in
special education that points to promising ways for
teaching challenging content to students with disabilities. Our focus is on empirical research that seems
to have strong potential for broad application in realschool settings. We begin by discussing a line of research on enhancing student acquisition of secondary
content. We then discuss the research base on specific
tools and strategies that have been effective in helping
students with disabilities learn advanced reading comprehension and writing skills, both at the primary and
secondary levels. We conclude with a view of potential
new directions in research and teaching.
CONTENT ENHANCEMENT: EVOLUTION
OF A PARADIGM
A significant line of research in secondary special education teaching has been conducted over nearly two
decades, designed to provide students with disabilities
the support they need to learn challenging content. An
important purpose of this research has been to prepare students with disabilities for success in general
education classrooms. The model of instruction advocated deviates substantially from the lecture and largegroup-discussion format that has dominated content instruction at the secondary level (Putnam, Deshler, &
Schumaker, 1993). Rather, the model addresses both
how students engage in content learning and how teachers present and coordinate the learning process.
Beginning about 20 years ago, Alley, Deshler, and
colleagues realized it was as important to teach students
how to learn as it was to teach them specific content. This
led to a quiet revolution in special education teaching
at the high school and middle school levels (Gersten,
1998). The teaching approaches advocated by Alley,
Deshler, Schumaker, and their colleagues were developed with two goals in mind:
r Enhancement of students’ learning of material presented in classes such as social studies, math, and
science, and
r Development of students’ abilities to learn from
conventional classroom teaching.
The approaches they developed centered on students
acquiring strategies for content learning.
Learning strategies developed in the 1980s were
based on principles of behavior and task analysis, rather
than on careful modeling of the performance of experts in specific content areas, as were later cognitive
strategies. The most significant contribution of these
approaches for students with high incidence disabilities has been the Strategies Intervention Model (SIM).
This model has eight stages of instruction that teachers
follow to teach specific academic strategies to their students (Ellis, Deshler, Lenz, Schumaker, & Clark, 1991).
Influenced by research on cognitive-behavior modification (Meichenbaum, 1977), the stages are ordered for
students to modify their inner speech guiding strategic
performance (Ellis & Lenz, 1996). The primary purpose
of each of the eight stages is listed in Table 1.
A critical feature of the progression of strategy instruction is the transfer of responsibility for performance from the teacher to the student. As students improve their use of these strategies, the teacher’s role
TABLE 1
Eight Stages of the Strategies Intervention Model:
Purpose Statements
1. Students make a commitment to learning strategies that can help
them do better in content-area class.
2. Present the new strategy to students so they can learn the processes
involved in using it.
3. Teachers model the strategy primarily by thinking aloud and working
through the strategy.
4. Students describe the learning strategy in their own words.
5. Students apply the strategy in the context of carefully selected
materials and situations.
6. Students apply the strategy in the context of real-classroom demands.
7. Students learn how the strategy can be applied in other settings.
8. Students apply and adapt the strategy in other settings.
LEARNING DISABILITIES PRACTICE
shifts from that of a director of learning to one of facilitator or coach. Research to develop the SIM (and
related models) has addressed the importance of getting
students to understand the purpose of learning strategies and to articulate the steps involved in executing
them successfully. As the students increase their strategy proficiency they also graduate from tasks tightly
“controlled” in terms of difficulty to more challenging
content. The final stage of the model is to prepare the
students for generalization.
Originally, learning strategies were conceived as
ways to prepare students to “attack situations not
previously encountered” (Clark, Deshler, Schumaker,
Alley, & Warner, 1984, p. 145), but their success in
enhancing the type of transfer implied in this goal has
been limited. Typically, students with disabilities have
been able to learn the necessary steps in executing the
strategies and then use these strategies on tasks that are
similar to the teaching tasks, but they have had limited
success in applying them outside of contexts in which
they were learned (Schumaker & Deshler, 1988; Wong,
1991, 1994). This problem stemmed in part from the
traditional practice of teaching strategies outside the
content curriculum class.
Early attempts to teach cognitive strategies focused
on generic skills without sufficient attention to how
they are executed in specific academic domains (Wong,
1994). We now know that much of strategy use is domain specific. Generalization of strategy learning to
learning content in other academic domains is often
difficult (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). Teaching
generic learning strategies divorced from teaching academic content tends to result in students failing to apply
these strategies when it really counts.
We believe the shift to teaching strategies within specific academic domains will increasingly become the
norm as teachers implement IDEA’s mandate that students with disabilities have meaningful access to the
general curriculum. Problems in the successful transfer of learning strategies may have been exacerbated
by the separation of content taught in the regular classroom from the learning strategies taught in the resource
room, a common instructional pattern in special education until quite recently. Strategies were often taught in
resource settings with the intention to prepare students
for general education classrooms.
Attempts to understand why students failed to transfer skills across classroom settings led to an important
insight. Each academic discipline has its unique ways of
reasoning and structures that must be understood as part
of successfully learning the content. For students with
learning difficulties, acquiring strategies to succeed in
multiple content settings requires being taught in these
settings, even when the instruction focuses more on general learning strategies than on strategies tied specifically to subject-area content (Alexander & Judy, 1988;
Jones, Palincsar, Ogle, & Carr, 1987). One good example of this is the research by Palincsar, Anderson, and
David (1993), who found that the reciprocal teaching
approach they had used so successfully to teach read-
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ing comprehension could not be used in teaching science, where the nature of discourse and methods were
drastically different. New approaches that bridged the
essential features of reciprocal teaching with the language of science needed to be developed.
Researchers have written about teaching in a way
that conveys this domain-specific perspective. Jones,
Palincsar, Ogle, and Carr (1987) and Cobb (1994) have
called for a conception of teaching in which the classroom teacher’s role is both to convey the content of a
lesson and to teach students the processes required for
reasoning, analysis, and problem solving in a particular academic domain. Bulgren, Hock, Schumaker, and
Deshler (1995) showed how this type of teaching could
benefit students and help them successfully apply strategies they learned in new situations. Twelve high school
students with learning disabilities were taught a method
for identifying and grouping important information in
history using a concept map. They were also taught a
strategy for recalling information for test taking, which
involved learning to create a mnemonic to help them
recall information from their concept maps.
As the researchers predicted, students made substantial improvement in creating mnemonic procedures on
their own for recalling information (see also Mastropieri
& Scruggs, 1989). Students also demonstrated the ability to construct different mnemonic devices based on
demands of the task, a demonstration of the type of
flexible thinking that Bulgren et al. (1995) were hoping to find. Most importantly, students demonstrated
improved performance on content area tests, improvements directly attributable to the learning strategies
intervention. One conclusion of the study is that the
process of constructing concept maps with extensive
support from the teacher may be a promising technique
for helping students with disabilities grasp historical
concepts.
Recent Shifts in Content Enhancement
Significant changes have taken place in learning strategies research. Teachers are still encouraged to learn
the stages of strategy instruction that have been empirically established, but are now also encouraged to
take greater responsibility for manipulating activities
within those stages to make them compatible with the
individual learner and the content being learned. In this
more extensive content enhancement model, teachers
think critically about the content they cover, determine
what approaches to learning need to be in operation
for students to be successful, and teach with routines
and instructional supports that assist students applying appropriate strategies and techniques (Bulgren,
Deshler, & Schumaker, 1997). The teacher, in effect,
teaches content and learning processes simultaneously.
Importantly, the teacher also enhances the clarity with
which she or he teachers the content, stressing what the
students should learn, as well as how.
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A study by Scanlon, Deshler, and Schumaker (1996)
demonstrated the effects of this more intensive model of
content enhancement. The purpose of the study was to
determine the effects of training secondary content area
teachers to teach learning strategies to students with and
without learning disabilities. All strategies were taught
in the context of units these teachers planned to cover.
The primary strategy was a series of steps for recognizing the text structure used in a textbook or class lesson,
identifying key information, and graphically depicting
how that information was related. Results showed that
students with learning disabilities made large gains in
their knowledge of the strategy steps, and in the quality
of the graphic organizers they developed. Their posttest
scores in these areas were similar to students without
disabilities.
The study supported two assumptions about teaching
challenging content to students with learning disabilities. First, it seems possible and feasible for students
with learning disabilities to learn complex, flexible
strategies in inclusive settings. Second, it seems important for students with learning disabilities to have
opportunities to explain and articulate concepts to their
teachers or peers in order to really grasp them.
This evolution of research and the learning strategies
it has produced is a direct result of the recognition of all
that is involved in helping inactive (i.e., nonstrategic)
learners to perform in ways like their more strategic
peers. It is also a direct response to the gap between
the skills of secondary students with LD and the secondary curriculum. The movement toward content enhancement has been a recognition of the roles the environment and the specific task play in determining a
student’s strategic performance. Increasingly, it has intersected with the body of research that emanated from
cognitive psychology in the 1980s and 1990s.
PROCEDURAL FACILITATORS
TO GUIDE STRATEGIES
In the mid 1980s, instructional researchers realized that
algorithmic or “step by step explicit strategies” that
were effective in teaching many students with disabilities how to decode or compute were not appropriate
for complex, cognitive activities. Within more complex
learning activities, such as comprehension, expressive
writing, and problem solving, flexibility is always important, revising and refining (i.e., self-monitoring) are
critical, and no two people engage in the process the
same way. Researchers were aware that somehow flexibility needed to be taught. Instruction needed to include
ways to decipher the meaning of paragraphs in which
there was more than one main idea, ways to identify and
integrate the range of character clues that may support
valid inferences about the reasons characters in novels
take action, and ways to communicate to students that
literature and historical events can be interpreted from
multiple perspectives.
Thus the dilemma was posed: How was it possible
to “teach” something as mysterious as the process of
writing (Graham & Harris, 1989), or discernment of
the theme of a short story (Williams, Brown, Silverstein,
& deCani, 1994) with the clarity and specificity often
required in teaching students with LD? The field of
special education has made extraordinary progress in
tackling this dilemma.
From the beginning, researchers were aware that
teaching students when to use what they learned was
often as important as teaching the strategy itself. The
term “metacognition” was used frequently in early research to describe the reflective and self-monitoring nature of what was required on the part of students to learn
effectively.
Descriptive research consistently indicated, for example, that students with learning disabilities failed to
spontaneously organize unfamiliar material, tended to
ask themselves fewer questions when they read, and had
difficulties transferring approaches or strategies to novel
situations (Brown, 1978; Kolligian & Sternberg, 1987;
Miller, 1985; Torgesen, 1977; Swanson, 1987; Wong,
1991). To address these difficulties, researchers have
tried to “encapsulate” the processes used by competent
readers and writers, and have used a variety of ingenious methods to teach these processes to students with
disabilities. Much of the impetus for these approaches
has come from cognitive psychology.
These methods have been called a variety of
names, including procedural facilitators (Bereiter &
Scardamalia, 1987; Englert, Raphael, Anderson,
Anthony, & Stevens, 1991; Graves & Montague, 1991),
cognitive strategies (Harris & Pressley, 1991), and scaffolds (Palincsar & Brown, 1984). Some rely heavily on graphic organizers (Englert et al., 1991; Idol,
1987). Most involve intensive modeling and monitoring by the teacher (Graham & Harris, 1989; Wong,
Butler, Ficzere, & Kuperis, 1997), while many rely
heavily on peer interaction (Englert et al., 1991;
Palincsar et al, 1993), and all are multifaceted. We use
the term procedural facilitators to refer to a set of instructional approaches that share many common features of these various approaches and some distinct
differences, particularly their concept of the teacher’s
role.
Procedural Facilitators to Guide Students
Toward Expert Performance
Procedural facilitators are questions, prompts, or simple outlines of important learning structures that teachers use on a daily basis to help students emulate the
performance of more expert learners (Scardamalia &
Bereiter, 1986). They also provide a common language
for discussing the cognitive task or activity. The goal is
to provide students with a “plan of action” for attacking
the task as well as a system for providing ongoing feedback and support. This “plan of action” addresses the
LEARNING DISABILITIES PRACTICE
learners’ need for help with organization and structure
(Kolligian & Sternberg, 1987).
Helping students effectively use a “plan of action”
is accomplished by having competent adults or peers
verbalize the processes that many proficient readers or
writers or mathematicians go through when they solve
academic problems. Procedural facilitators assist teachers (or peers) in verbalizing how they actually compose
a piece of narrative writing, or how they know when
they need to reread a troubling portion of a textbook.
Facilitators provide a shared language between teachers and students and offer students a permanent reminder of the steps and strategies used by highly proficient readers or writers. Ingeniously, students are taught
steps (or more fluid procedures) that outline the individualized processing modeled for them. While earlier
research stressed teacher modeling and thinking aloud,
subsequent research suggests that how teachers—or
proficient peers—respond to students’ attempts to use
the strategies or procedural facilitators is every bit as
important. Concepts such as cognitive apprenticeship
(Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989) have been used to
describe this process.
Three intervention studies represent the progression
in procedural facilitation practices and the evolution of
the concept of cognitive apprenticeships. The first study
we will discuss, on reading comprehension by Idol and
her associates, demonstrates the benefits of revealing
the structure of texts to students with disabilities, rather
than merely informing them of what categories of information to think about. Their findings about reading
instruction informed advances in writing interventions.
The second set of studies, by Englert and colleagues,
highlights the usefulness of graphic aids to represent
processes to students and, importantly, the value of dialogue for necessary reflection. Finally, work by Graham,
Harris, and others investigated necessary flexibility in
the use of reflection for revisions for producing quality
writing. They have also investigated the integration of
procedural facilitators with more traditional strategies
based on task and behavior analyses.
Story Grammar and Story Mapping as a Tool
to Enhance Reading Comprehension
One of the seminal studies on the use of procedural
facilitators was conducted by Idol (1987), who used a
story-mapping technique to enhance the reading comprehension of students with learning disabilities. The
study was of particular historical importance because
the researcher tried out the technique in an inclusive
setting with heterogeneous groups of students with and
without disabilities. Her earlier research had established
the efficacy of the story-mapping procedure with a small
group of students with learning disabilities (Idol &
Croll, 1987).
Idol’s goal was to use a procedural facilitator that
would “draw the readers’ attention to the common ele-
69
ments among stories,” which she hoped would enhance
the “possibility of the reader searching his or her mind
for possible information” related to the text (i.e., activating background knowledge in contemporary terminology) (p. 197). In other words, the story map was
to serve as a framework for integrating story elements
from the text with the reader’s own experiences.
The procedural facilitator used was a story map. This
map required students to record information directly
related to 9 or 10 story-grammar questions. The map
helped students record important elements of the story.
Students could do this either as they were reading or after they had finished reading. Story-grammar elements
including descriptions of the setting, the problem, the
actions taken to solve problems, and final outcomes.
Examples of the questions used throughout the intervention include: Where did the story take place? When
did the story take place? How did [Main Character] try
to solve the problem? Was it hard to solve the problem?
(Explain in your own words).
The use of heterogeneous cooperative groups was an
important contribution of Idol’s study. She hypothesized
that integrating students with and without disabilities
would help students with disabilities engage in a “beneficial form of vicarious learning by viewing the desired
responses of more skilled readers” (Idol, 1987, p. 197).
Subsequent research has established the numerous benefits of cooperative groups, including enhancing learner
understanding, increasing engaged time, and maximizing practice opportunities.
Results demonstrated that the three students with
learning disabilities and the two low-achieving students
clearly benefited from the story-mapping instruction.
This benefit occurred despite the fact that these five
students were reading materials written for grade levels
one or more years more difficult than their placement
levels indicated.
On the measure of listening comprehension, the results showed that both average- and low-achieving students made gains from pretest to posttest. However,
the gains made by students with disabilities were far
stronger than those made by the average-achieving
group.
Idol found that, when given the option, students almost invariably preferred to use the maps after reading
a story rather than during their reading. This finding—
that students often adapt and personalize a strategy explicitly taught to them—was similar to what Adams,
Carnine, and Gersten (1982) found in their research on
expository text.
The next wave of research began to take for granted
that students will invariably adapt and personalize specific strategies. Newer research stressed flexibility in
how and when the procedural facilitator was used (Beck,
McKeown, Sandora, Kucan, & Worthy, 1996; Englert
& Mariage, 1996; Okolo & Ferretti, 1996).
A third finding in the Idol (1987) study was unexpected. During the intervention, the classroom teacher
required students to keep a journal of the stories
they read. Idol analyzed these stories for inclusion of
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story-grammar elements in the students’ writing before and after the intervention. Not surprisingly, she
found that prior to the intervention, students in the lowachieving group (i.e., the three students with learning
disabilities and two other low-performing students) included fewer story-grammar components in their journal entries than other students.
After the intervention, students in the low-achieving
group showed a significant increase in the number of elements they included in the stories they wrote. In fact,
four of the five students in the low-achieving group
wrote stories in their journals that usually included all of
the story-grammar elements they were taught. This finding showed generalization of the skills students learned
during the interventions across tasks and subject areas.
Numerous subsequent studies that followed Idol’s
confirmed that explicitly teaching text structures such
as the story map enhances reading comprehension for
students with learning disabilities (Dimino, Gersten,
Carnine, & Blake, 1990; Gurney, Gersten, Dimino,
& Carnine, 1990; Williams, Brown, Silverstein, &
deCani, 1994).
Using Text Structures to Enhance the Quality
of Students’ Writing
Writing instruction has become a major thrust of instructional research and an area in which the use
of procedural facilitators has clear benefits. Wong,
Butler, Ficzere, and Kuperis (1997) enumerated several barriers to effective writing experienced by many
students with LD. Specifically, they noted that students with learning disabilities experience difficulties
with both mechanical aspects of writing (e.g., spelling,
grammar) and knowledge of—or comfort with—procedures utilized by skilled writers. Empirical findings
over the decades have consistently shown that these barriers result in writing by students with disabilities that
is often short, poorly organized, and sometimes lifeless
(Isaacson, 1995).
A cornerstone of the approach to teaching writing
adopted by special education researchers is that the
technical demands of a cognitive task, such as accuracy of spelling and punctuation, may be temporarily
de-emphasized so that teachers and students can focus
their intellectual energy on the conceptual aspects of
writing. This is a radically different way of teaching
for many special educators. Much of special education
writing instruction has focused on the teaching of mechanical skills (Englert et al., 1991). This more rigid
focus is probably a function of both a tradition in special
education that students need to learn the basics before
taking on learning more difficult concepts (Klenck &
Palincsar, 1996), as well as how mysterious and difficult
it is to describe and teach the writing process.
A key organizing principle in this line of research
is that, although there are writing conventions specific
to certain genres, there is no “correct” way to construct
text. In narrative writing, for example, some writers like
to begin with the climax of a story and proceed backward; others like to develop their characters before developing the plot. The approach used to construct a narrative is not what makes the story more or less engaging.
A second key organizing principle is that different
genres of writing are based on inherent text structures.
A persuasive argument paper contains elements such as
a thesis with supporting points that differ considerably
from those found in narrative writing, where characters and plots are emphasized. This variability makes it
difficult, if not impossible, to develop one strategy for
teaching students explicitly “how to write.”
Rather, good writing instruction involves teaching
what Englert, Raphael, Anderson, Anthony, and Stevens
(1991) called “overlapping and recursive processes.”
These processes do not proceed in a particular order
and one process may inform another in such a way that
the author returns to previous “steps” to update or revise
on a regular basis.
Pioneering work in this area emanated from Englert
et al. (1991). The instructional approach they developed challenges students to use text structures to generate relevant details for their writing, to link them in a
comprehensible form, and then to revise their writing in
relation to standard text structure conventions (Englert
et al., 1991).
Components of instruction included extensive
teacher modeling of the inner dialogue expert writers
engage in during the writing process, extensive support to students during lessons and writing sessions,
procedural facilitators for students to use to guide the
process, and peer collaboration through writing conferences. Englert et al. (1991) used procedural facilitators called “think sheets” to encourage students to
plan, organize, write, edit, and revise their written products, in which they compared a child and his dad, or a
child and her best friend, or a chimpanzee and a giraffe.
Figure 1 is a sample think sheet. The authors hypothesized that students receiving this cognitive strategy
instruction would perform better than comparison students on writing and reading comprehension tests and
on measures of metacognitive knowledge.
The study was conducted simultaneously in both general and special education settings. Students in the cognitive strategy condition received five months of instruction that consisted of four phases: text analysis,
modeling of the writing process, guided student practice
in composition, and independent writing. Students in
the comparison classrooms received their regular writing instruction, which included opportunities to compose texts two to three times per week.
Think sheets were used extensively during all four
phases of the writing instruction. Results of an interview
to assess students’ metacognition in writing revealed
that students in the experimental group learned more
about the writing process than students in the comparison group. In terms of writing ability, there was a significant main effect for organization and use of text structures favoring students in the experimental group. This
LEARNING DISABILITIES PRACTICE
71
FIGURE 1 An example of a completed comparison/contrast organization form.
positive effect occurred across high- and low-achieving
groups, as well as for students with learning disabilities. On a transfer measure, where students were asked
to compose an expository text of their choice, results
again revealed a significant effect favoring students in
the experimental classrooms. On a transfer measure of
reading comprehension, there was an effect favoring
the experimental group on identifying the major parts
of expository text structures and for the number of comparisons recalled. It is interesting to note that these treatment effects were due primarily to gains made by students with learning disabilities.
Another important finding in the Englert et al., study
was that despite huge differences favoring general education students versus students with LD on pretest mea-
sures, there were no significant differences between experimental students with and without LD on posttest
writing performance. In comprehension, the only significant difference favoring students in the treatment
condition was on the ability of students to recall the main
idea of the text they read, a difference that can logically
be linked to intensive instruction on text structure.
The think sheets clearly played a central role in the
writing gains made by students in the experimental
group. However, it is important to emphasize that their
primary purpose was to provide concrete support for
the extensive interactions between teachers and students that took place about writing. It is also important to note that the task of writing expository text was
not at all modified for the special education students.
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Modification came instead in the level of guidance and
extended practice provided.
A final note on Englert’s findings is that while students’ writing had improved in its substance, it continued to lack style; few students developed voices as
writers. Despite successfully including more elements
of conventional text, student writing samples were often
tedious to read and rigidly constructed. For students to
begin to develop a voice as writers, peer dialogue was
necessary.
Developing a Personal Writing Style
An extensive line of research on procedural facilitators in writing by Graham and Harris (1989) and their
colleagues (Graham, MacArthur, & Schwartz, 1995;
Graham, Schwartz, & MacArthur, 1993) has tackled
the problem of improving the quality of writing by students with learning disabilities. In their earlier studies,
Graham and Harris (1989) taught students a questionasking strategy they could use to write better quality stories. This technique was similar to the story-map questions of Idol (1987). Graham and Harris demonstrated
that procedural facilitators significantly improved the
writing quality of students with learning disabilities.
However, like Englert et al. (1991), they found that the
writing was still considerably weaker in style than the
writing of their grade-level peers, being somewhat rigid
and overly mechanical.
In a more recent study, Graham, Schwartz, and
MacArthur (1995) directly addressed the problem of
how to further improve the quality and style of writing
by students with disabilities and make it resemble more
closely the writing produced by peers. They approached
this challenge by targeting the process of revision, one
of the crucial stages of the writing process.
Graham et al. (1995) targeted this area because they
found that students with LD, in general, “revise infrequently, or concentrate their revising efforts on proofreading . . . [on] mechanical and word-level changes,
that have little or no impact on the quality of their writing” (p. 230). The authors noted that this problem is
particularly acute for students with learning disabilities, who “approach the revision of their compositions
as a ‘housecleaning task.’ Most of their revisions are
aimed at trying to tidy up the appearance of the paper,
making it neater and correcting errors of mechanics and
usage as best they can” (p. 237).
The authors investigated the effects of procedural facilitators on the revision techniques and final
written products of students with learning disabilities. Students in the comparison condition were requested to think about what they wanted to change
or add to their first drafts to make their stories better,
and then rewrote their stories with the accompanying
changes.
In the two experimental conditions, students were
taught to use procedural facilitators to add at least three
dimensions to their stories to make them better. Some
students in this condition were given a sheet containing
a series of prompts to help them in the revision process.
The goal of these “planning sheets” was to help them
organize the information they wanted to add to the final
drafts of their papers.
The final drafts in the experimental and comparison
conditions did not differ significantly in terms of length.
However, students in the experimental conditions wrote
final drafts that were judged higher in terms of overall
quality than the drafts of students in the comparison
condition. The analysis of the changes made in the revisions is particularly interesting. Students in both the
experimental and comparison conditions frequently revised their first drafts, averaging about 23 revisions per
100 words. This was comparable to the number of revisions made by average-achieving students in a pilot
study.
An important finding was that although the number
of revisions was not influenced by instructional condition, the types of revisions were. Students in experimental conditions made more revisions that changed
the meaning of the text than students in the comparison
condition (47 percent as compared to 16 percent).
Also, most of the revisions involving meaning
change by students in the experimental condition had a
positive impact on the quality of the final draft. Three
out of four revisions were rated as making the text better, and the quality of these changes was rated significantly higher in the experimental condition. Findings
support the conclusion that students in the experimental
conditions made more complex changes (i.e., meaning
change vs. mechanical) than comparison students, and
made changes that more often improved the quality of
their writing and final papers. In other words, with the
support of a relatively simple procedural facilitator, students with disabilities were able to reflect on, critically
analyze, and improve their writing.
However, a word of caution is in order. Although students seemed to fill out their “revision lists” without difficulty, most changes were at the individual word level
only. The procedural facilitators may have helped students organize and direct their attention, and increased
their self-monitoring ability, but the revisions were more
or less simple and relatively superficial improvements,
largely focusing only on mechanics, rather than style or
clarity.
Graham et al. (1995) suggested that an optimal
instructional strategy for students with learning disabilities, at least in writing, might be to pair selfmonitoring techniques with more substantive instructional methodologies such as teacher modeling,
thinking aloud, and strategy instruction. This type of
cognitive apprenticeship model echoes the “hybrid” approach to instruction used in studies on situated cognition in math and science (Bottge, 2001; Woodward,
Carnine, & Gersten, 1988) and models for teaching
writing used in the current research by Englert (1991)
and her colleagues.
LEARNING DISABILITIES PRACTICE
NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE TEACHING
OF WRITING AND COMPREHENSION
Procedural facilitators and cognitive strategies support
students taking action. They can stimulate thinking and
promote more effective organization. The classic research study by Graham and Harris (1989) intentionally
juxtaposed formal questions related to story-grammar
elements, such as “Who is my story about?” or “What
is the problem that the character faces?” with more casual aesthetic “steps,” such as “let your mind wander,”
in an attempt to actively encourage personal expression. Even researchers such as Wong (1994), who initially had difficulty including whimsical steps in their
procedural facilitators or strategies, have come to realize that interactive dialogue between students and
teachers or students and their peers is a critical instructional factor in enhancing the quality of students’
writing.
Almost from the beginning, many researchers
seemed to be implicitly aware that one of the most important advances procedural facilitators and cognitive
strategies could promote was encouraging students to
think aloud. These techniques could build a way to
have academic discussions and promote the realization
that groups of peers were essential in facilitating this
process, since discussions can easily become contrived
between an adult and a child. This was apparent in the
seminal research of Idol (1987).
Englert et al. (1991) found that when students used
text structures, such as compare and contrast, their essays were well organized, but sometimes extraordinarily
tedious to read. Peer feedback was necessary to breathe
life into the essays and support students in their development of writing style. Even the earliest research on
story grammar (Idol, 1987) used heterogeneous groups
to promote dialogue.
Researchers have begun to make more explicit the
primarily supportive role strategies and facilitators play
in helping students to develop interesting ideas to write
about and to discuss with their peers ways to express
those ideas effectively in their writing. MacArthur,
Schwartz, Graham, Molloy, and Harris (1996) suggested that the major goal of procedural facilitators and
cognitive strategies was to help students bridge the gap
between students’ oral and written language, to encourage “elaborated dialogue.” Kucan and Beck (1997) note
the importance of the “shift from identifying and teaching discrete strategies to focusing on students’ efforts
to make sense of ideas or build their own understanding
of them” (p. 285).
Kucan and Beck (1997) and Gersten, Fuchs,
Williams, and Baker (in press) go on to describe a more
fluid, interactive mode of teaching, where multiple
strategies are introduced in a short time frame, and
students are coached (rather than directly taught) as to
when a given strategy might be appropriate. Students’
“personalization” of strategies is actively encouraged,
and comprehension instruction is, as best as possible,
73
“tailored” to students’ current ways of making meaning
of text.
Frequently, procedural facilitator and learning strategy researchers have drawn on the social nature of learning (Moll, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978) to help students arrive
at greater degrees of independence and resultant flexibility (Englert & Mariage, 1996; Palincsar & Brown,
1989; Scanlon, Deshler, & Schumaker, 1996; Wong et
al., 1997). The vehicle most commonly used today for
maximizing the social nature of learning is elaborated
dialogue.
Elaborated dialogue, also referred to as interactive
dialogue, think-alouds, and collaborative processes, is
a verbal exchange about a complex cognitive activity
among a teacher and students or students with each
other. Dialogue can include explicit modeling of strategies, critical evaluation of verbal or written student responses, questioning, and elaborated responses. During
these exchanges, students are apprenticed into higher,
more detailed, and richer forms of expression and processes for higher-order activities (Englert & Mariage,
1996; Wong et al., 1997).
Unlike the use of procedural facilitators, there currently is only a small body of research on the effectiveness of this approach with students with disabilities
(Gersten et al., in press). One study in particular, however, does suggest its widespread potential.
Wong, Butler, Ficzere, and Kuperis (1997) designed
a multiple component strategy for improving the quality of essay writing by students with learning disabilities in grades 9 and 10. They combined aspects of the
Englert et al. (1991) compare-contrast think sheets as
the basis for composing essays and the COPS learning strategy (Schumaker, Nolan, & Deshler, 1985) as
a means to check Capitalization, Overall organization
during the third, or revision phase, Punctuation, and
Spelling. Pairs of students took turns assuming the role
of teacher/critic and checked their partner’s work for
clarity, lack of ambiguity, and use of conventions. Wong
et al. (1997) also included three phases of instruction,
starting with extensive teacher modeling and thinking
aloud, and moving toward collaborative planning with a
partner and revisions based on feedback from the partner. They identified interactive dialogue as a key feature
of each phase.
This multicomponent intervention led to significant
growth in the quality of writing maintained over time.
Students’ improvements in metacognitive awareness of
the writing process also were apparent.
Interactive dialogue in all phases of the intervention served as the key function of helping students first
to engage in the process of compare-contrast writing,
and then to improve their writing. For example, during the planning phase, interactive dialogue helped two
students become clearer and see information they had
overlooked. For example, one student said to the other,
“we’ve got enough ideas for comparison . . . we need
more for contrast” (Wong et al., 1997, p. 13). Wong and
her colleagues hypothesized that interactive dialogues,
74
BAKER ET AL.: PROCEDURAL FACILITATORS
which led students through multiple cycles of reflection,
realization, and redress of problems, helped each student “see” his or her thoughts and write from another’s
perspective.
Elaborated dialogue between the teacher and students
was central in Phases One and Two, as was dialogue
among peers in Phase Three. Wong and her colleagues
concluded that interactive dialogue in the context of
an ongoing recursive process of reflection helped students see the inadequacies of their own writing and,
in the process, develop a sense of audience. This type
of “talk” about writing appeared necessary for students
with learning disabilities who had trouble “translating
their verbalized ideas into words and sentences” (Wong
et al., 1997, p. 7).
In an earlier and similar study designed to teach revision skills, Wong and colleagues (1994) found comparable results between two intervention conditions consisting of a planning strategy, coupled with interactive
dialogue between teachers and students, or between
students and students. Wong, Butler, Ficzere, Kuperis,
Corden, and Zelmer (1994) concluded that the comparability of effects suggested that interactive dialogue per
se may have been the pivotal factor in improved writing.
Thus, interactive dialogues appears crucial in taking
students with learning disabilities from simple to more
complex states of learning. They build on students’ current level of understanding, their ability to articulate
their ideas, and their ability to develop ideas and the
relationships between ideas.
Several researchers suggest that dialogue helps
bridge the gap between oral and written language
(MacArthur et al., 1996; Wong et al., 1997). The implicit theory behind studies using elaborated dialogues
is that students learn through verbal interactions with
teachers and peers, and that thinking aloud through dialogue leads to internalization of the procedures, processes, and ways of thinking. Internalization is assumed
to result in a more independent learner who knows,
and can flexibly apply, the “secrets” of the experts
in a given complex, cognitive activity. Wong and colleagues (1997) noted the increasing empirical support
for socially mediated learning with impressive gains in
such areas as reading comprehension and writing (Bos,
Anders, Fililp, & Jaffe, 1989; Palincsar & Brown, 1984;
Wong et al., 1994).
Contemporary research recognizes the importance of
interactive dialogue between students and teachers as a
means of “teaching” students reading comprehension
and writing. Interactive dialogue, like all procedural facilitators, is essentially a tool that provides a common
language between teachers and students to help guide
dialogue on elusive topics. The fact that the procedural
facilitators (think sheets, story maps, etc.) are visible
helps demystify the process for students with disabilities. In other words, it seems to be less important to
teach all steps in a strategy to a student than to use a
strategy or procedural facilitator to initiate and focus
dialogue that leads to higher levels of performance. In
these interactions, teachers model ways of thinking and
students display their current ways of thinking, either
with the teacher or with their peers. Teachers also respond to students’ attempts at organization, originality,
and unique interpretation. Then, as part of the dialogical
process of revisiting aspects of expert ways of thinking,
questioning, answering, and elaborating dialogue, new
ways of thinking are constructed and practiced.
Focused dialogue devoted to comprehension of text
has been increasingly assimilated into classwide peer
tutoring, a procedure for providing students with opportunities to work cooperatively while providing strategic feedback to each other (Fuchs, Fuchs, Mathes,
& Simmons, 1997; Greenwood, Carta, Hart, Kamps,
Terry, Arreaga-Mayer, Atwater, Walker, Risley, &
Delaquadri, 1992; Simmons, Fuchs, Fuchs, Hodge, &
Mathes, 1994). These studies provide the beginnings of
empirical support for the impact of elaborated dialogue
on comprehension by students with disabilities. With
both contemporary models of peer tutoring and contemporary approaches to teaching the process of writing and comprehending, feedback can be truly tailored
to the unique abilities and perspectives of each student.
We believe this recurring theme of thoughtfully integrating a variety of instructional approaches and techniques is critical if students with disabilities are going
to be successful in today’s classrooms. The emphasis
on integration also speaks directly to what parents of
students with disabilities see as the primary challenges
facing those who teach their children: an expansion of
teaching repertoires, content-area classrooms that enable strategic learning, and a move away from exclusive reliance on single strategies toward the use of complex, multiple approaches that promote independence
and flexibility on the part of the learner.
BRIDGING THE RESEARCH TO PRACTICE
GAP: THE IMPORTANCE OF MULTIPLE
TEACHING STRATEGIES TO ACHIEVE
A BROAD ARRAY OF OBJECTIVES
We close with a major theme generated in the focus
groups supported by OSEP on means to improve practice. The participants, many of whom were parents of
students with disabilities, consistently voiced concern
that many teachers (be they special or general educators) often do not use more than one teaching approach
to reach an instructional goal. If a student does not benefit from that approach, there is a tendency to blame the
student for the failure.
Parents, in particular, observed that if the approach
was not successful with a student or group of students,
the tendency was to persevere with that approach and
make other changes in other areas, such as lowering
expectations or modifying tests. This observation parallels a consistent research finding by Fuchs, Fuchs, and
their colleagues (e.g., Fuchs, Fuchs, & Hamlett, 1994),
who found that when teachers were presented with data
indicating that a particular student was not progressing
LEARNING DISABILITIES PRACTICE
at a desired rate, the majority simply indicated they
would try to spend more time with the student, rather
than seriously consider how the particular teaching approach might be contributing to the student’s difficulty.
The goal for special education teachers to become
adept at a variety of instructional approaches is likely
to be a challenge. Most are trained to use one or two approaches and are taught that consistency and intensity of
that approach are critical for special education students.
The history of isolation of special education teachers from other teachers and from the general education
curriculum may also contribute to these teachers’ tendency to teach using the single best (and most familiar)
method they know. However, as special education students spend more time in general education classrooms
and with general education curricula, special education
teachers will have much more contact with a variety
of teaching approaches. We predict this contact will
require an increase in instructional planning between
general and special educators regarding when and how
different teaching approaches may be contributing to
learning outcomes for students with disabilities.
Teaching with Multiple Strategies
Using more collaborative teaching models is likely to
increase general education teachers’ familiarity with a
variety of teaching methods. As this occurs, however,
it will be important to study the effect of teaching multiple approaches on overall teaching quality. In one of
the few implementation studies of cognitive strategy instruction, Englert et al. (1991) found the less effective
teachers were those who taught the steps to the strategy in a very rigid fashion, usually those who were
not overly familiar with the technique. Although these
less effective teachers modeled the writing process, and
even gave students a glimpse of the inner dialogue that
writers engage in during monitoring and revision, they
provided few opportunities for students to contribute to
the construction of the text.
More effective teachers engaged students in the
writing process by bridging “the gap between their experiences and what they needed to know about writing”
(Englert & Mariage, 1992, p. 131). The importance of
this teaching quality was immediately apparent. In the
more effective classrooms, once students knew how to
use the action plan, the cognitive workload involved
in writing was lessened so that students could actually
devote energy to articulating ideas and organizing their
text. This transfer of control is critical to students’
effective strategy use, but represents, perhaps, one of
the most difficult aspects of teaching. For example,
it may be that asking teachers to implement different
approaches to writing instruction runs the risk of
decreasing the quality with which any one approach is
implemented.
However, this potential need to simplify the complexity of any individual approach in order to broaden
the range of possible approaches was addressed by fo-
75
cus group members in the interviews. Clearly, participants were talking about variety for the sake of variety,
but in the context of serious professional development
for teachers targeting how different strategies can help
teachers reach particular instructional goals. Teachers
would have to learn how different strategies might be
helpful to them in the face of specific kinds of problems, and they would also need an understanding of
which approaches tended to be effective with students
with disabilities.
CONCLUSION
Throughout this article, we have stressed the importance
of using multiple approaches to teaching to reach the
complex goals of special education, and attempted to
delineate occasions where intentional use of multiple
teaching strategies leads to greater learning and greater
transfer.
Researchers are experimenting with a vast array of
models, using a range of alternative approaches and
conceptual frameworks, to begin to bridge the gap between research and practice. Addressing issues raised
by parents and teachers as a means to help frame research has been a major force in contemporary professional dialogue on instructional research (Dunst,
Ferguson, Singer, Bryan, Gersten, Irvin, & Keating,
1998; Turnbull & Turnbull, 1990; Carnine, 1997;
Billups, 1997). This direction provides means to reduce
the gap between research and practice (Beck et al., 1996;
Carnine, 1997; Englert & Tarrant, 1995; Kline, Deshler,
& Schumaker, 1992; Malouf & Schiller, 1995; Richardson, 1990; Schumm & Vaughn, 1995) and to create instructional approaches that are empirically validated,
sophisticated, yet also feasible for classroom use.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article is adapted, in part, from Gersten, Baker,
and Pugach (with Scanlon & Chard) (in press). Preparation of the manuscript was supported, in part, from
Grants No. H324C990063 and H180U60037 from the
Research-to-Practice Division, Office of Special Education Programs, U.S. Department of Education. We
would like to acknowledge the valuable feedback on
previous versions from Sylvia Smith, Tom Keating, and
Janet Otterstedt and for the assistance of Shaun Kohn
and Joyce Smith-Johnson in preparation of the current
version. An earlier version of the article was presented
at the annual conference of AERA in Chicago, IL in
April 1997.
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