Reading Miscues of College Students with and without Learning Disabilities

Abstract

Using authentic materials, this study compared the oral reading miscues of 20 university students with reading related learning disabilities to 20 controls matched for age, gender, ethnicity, college GPA, reading achievement score, and college of major. All participants orally read two passages with different text structures from a college textbook. Miscues were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The students with learning disabilities miscued significantly more words in both passages than the controls (1058 to 137 words) and had a significantly higher percentage of loss-of- textual meaning miscues. This study provides evidence that reading decoding difficulties persist for students with learning disabilities even into college, and documents the reading decoding difficulties with authentic text rather than word lists.