Rauno-Georgiou-2007
Authors: Rauno Parrila, George Georgiou, Julie Corkett.
Publication: Exceptionality Education International Vol. 17 No. 2 2007 | DOI: 10.5206/eei.v17i2.7604
Abstract
This study examined the status of current reading, spelling, and phonological processing skills of 28 university students who reported a history of reading acquisition problems. The results indicated that 21 of these participants were currently able to comprehend text at a level expected for university students, although only 8 at a rate comparable to that of university students without a history of reading acquisition problems. In addition, all but two participants showed current problems in two or more of the additional areas examined, including word reading, decoding, spelling, and phonological processing. The performance of ten participants who had a recent diagnosis of reading disability was mostly indistinguishable from the performance of participants without such diagnosis, except on the phonological processing tasks.
Finally, the only task that the university students with a history of reading problems in this study performed equally well as the comparison group was untimed reading comprehension. In other words, when these students are assessed on their ability to comprehend text at their own pace, the performance level of most of them is comparable to that of other university students. Table 3indicated that all but seven participants were able to comprehend text at a level exhibited by the comparison participants. Thus, 21 of our 28 participants with a history of reading problems could be considered compensated at the level of being able to read to learn. It is interesting to note that using the same participant pool, Corkett, Parrila, and Hein (in press) reported that university students with a significant history of reading difficulties also do not report avoiding print-based learning strategies.
