ABSTRACT
Learning disabled (LD) students face challenging reading demands as they enter secondary school settings. While many of these students continue to face difficulties with basic reading skills such as fluent decoding, they now need to use a cadre of comprehension and metacomprehension strategies for learning information from text. In addition to increased reading demands, secondary students are expected to deepen and broaden their content knowledge through reading. Unfortunately, many LD students may lack the background in various domains of content knowledge because their instructional focus has been on basic decoding skills and low level reading comprehension. Because LD students spend much of their in-school time learning how to read, they are deprived of opportunities to read for learning concepts and information (Snider & Tarver, 1987). Furthermore, school observational research suggests that students attending resource rooms in elementary schools miss out on content instruction (McGill-Franzen & Allington, 1987; Richardson, Casanova, Placier, & Guilfoyle, 1989). The compounding of limited reading skills and strategies plus limited content area back-ground knowledge poses a tremendous threat for the learning disabled adolescent.
