| This study examined the effects of a cognitive mapping strategy on reading comprehension for students with mild disabilities--learning disabilities (LD) and educable mental retardation (EMR). The need to teach these reading comprehension deficits has been well documented in the literature. During reading these deficits are often a direct result of student's lack of strategy use, inefficient strategy use, or lack of efficient metacognition. Among recent teaching techniques, cognitive mapping has emerged as the new technique to increase reading comprehension. When used as a teacher-directed technique, its effectiveness at improving reading comprehension has been well documented; however, the use of this technique as a student strategy has not been documented. Therefore, this study sought to improve reading comprehension for students with mild disabilities through the use of a student-directed cognitive mapping strategy.; This study incorporated a pretest posttest control group design to control for sources of external and internal invalidity throughout the study. In this study, thirty students with mild disabilities who exhibit poor reading comprehension, as evidenced by low reading comprehension scores on standardized tests, were first matched on the three variables of exceptionality, grade, and Formal Reading Inventory score. After match pairs were determined, students were then assigned to either an experimental or control group. Of the thirty students, fifteen students were administered two pretests, taught to use the cognitive mapping strategy on reading passages, and administered two posttests. The other fifteen students were administered the same pretests, posttests, and reading passages; but, did not receive any training in the use of the cognitive mapping strategy. Results indicated that students with mild disabilities in the experimental group exhibited significantly higher difference scores on curriculum-based reading comprehension measures than those in the control group. Of the remaining instruments, no significant differences were found between the experimental and control group on attitude, metacognitive, or standardized reading comprehension measures. |
