Increasing Retention of Main Ideas through Questioning Strategies

This study investigated the effectiveness of questions in increasing learning disabled and normally achieving children's retention of main ideas of a story. The results indicate that questions increase the retention of main ideas in learning disabled children. However, the results indicate that questions have little effect on the retention of main ideas in normally achieving children. The findings are interpreted in terms of cognitively activating the learning disabled children by the questions; the normally achieving children were seen spontaneously and actively to process what they read. The results are interpreted to support Torgesen's conceptualization of the learning disabled child as an inactive learner.