Attitudes Toward Reading Expressed by Elementary School Students Diagnosed With Learning Disabilities

Attitude toward reading affects student's achievement. While conventional wisdom and comparisons with low-skilled, non-disabled students suggest that students with learning disabilities have negative attitudes toward reading, few studies exist to support these inferences. The present study uses the Elementary Reading Attitude Survey (McKenna & Kear, 1990) to describe elementary students' diagnosed with learning disabilities attitudes toward academic and recreational reading and to compare their attitudes with those expressed by their non-disabled peers. The findings show that students with learning disabilities who received reading instruction in special-education, resource rooms expressed reading attitudes that equaled or exceeded those expressed by low and average non-disabled students in a nationwide study conducted by McKenna and Kear (1990). The findings also indicated that the students' diagnosed with learning disabilities attitudes remained more stable across grades 1 through 5 than those expressed by their non-disabled students in the McKenna and Kear (1990) study.