Exposition: Reading, Writing, and the Metacognitive Knowledge of Learning Disabled Students

This study examined learning disabled students' expository reading and writing performance, and the potential relationship of their knowledge about expository texts to reading/writing performance. One hundred thirty-eight students equally divided among three ability groups (i.e., learning disabled, low-achieving, and high-achieving) completed three performance tasks: they composed two types of expository texts (e.g., comparison/contrast, explanation), read and recalled comparison/contrast and explanation expository texts, and wrote summaries using information from multiple sources. In addition, a subset of students were interviewed about their knowledge of the organization of expository texts. The results suggested that the compositions of learning disabled students were significantly less organized and contained fewer ideas than low-and high-achieving students. Examination of students' comprehension recalls suggested that learning disabled students ' recalls were significantly less organized than high-achieving students, and contained fewer ideas than low- and high-achieving students. Examination of students' summaries of multiple sources suggested that learning disabled students produced significantly less well-organized summaries that contained significantly fewer ideas than both low- and high-achieving students. Finally, an analysis of the interview data suggested that learning disabled students possessed less knowledge about processes related to organizing and to categorizing Ideas, as well as processes related to monitoring and to revising text on the basis of text structure.