Instructional Components That Predict Treatment Outcomes for Students With Learning Disabilities: Support for a Combined Strategy and Direct Instruction Model

Abstract

In this article I identify the instructional components across 180 intervention studies that best predicted effect sizes for students with learning disabilities. Although a number of methodological artifacts had a significant influence on the magnitude of treatment outcome, 16% of the variance in estimates of effect size was related to treatment components. Interventions, which included instructional components related to sequencing, drill-repetition-practice-feedback, segmentation of information, technology (structure presentation medium), controlling task difficulty (e.g., scaffolding), modeling problem-solving steps, presenting cues to prompt strategies use, supplementing teacher instruction (e.g., homework), small interactive groups, and directed response/questioning of students, accounted for the largest amount of variance in estimates of effect size. The results supported the pervasive influence of cognitive strategy and direct instruction models for remediating the academic difficulties. But the results suggested that a Combined Model is the instructional heuristic that yields the largest effect size.