Using PDAs with Concept Mapping Software to Improve Reading Comprehension for Students with Learning Disabilities

Students with learning disabilities often have difficulty with short-term memory, attention, and organization. As a result, students with learning disabilities trying to improve their academic perfomance, struggle to use many of the strategies that we take for granted. In addition to struggling with academic performance, students with disabilities also lack access to technology and support.  According to reports from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitative Research (2000), students with disabilities are not being prepared to use technology for learning.  A recent study found that almost 60% of individuals with disabilities have never used a personal computer, compared to less than 25% of those who are non-disabled (National Organization on Disabilities, 2000).

One academic area in which students with learning disabilities often struggle to use strategies for learning is reading comprehension.  Reading comprehension requires the ability to make meaning of words the students decode and to be able to use that information in a meaningful way.  One strategy for improving reading comprehension for students with learning disabilities is concept mapping.  Concept mapping is the process of creating graphic organizers to represent relationships among conceptual ideas (Scanlon, Duran, Reyes, & Gallego, 1992).  Although concept mapping has been advocated as a reading comprehension strategy since the late 1970s, only three studies examining its use for students with learning disabilities have been published in the past 10 years (Kim, Vaughn, Wanzek, & Wei, 2004).  

Given the lack of research on how technology can be used to enhance learning for students with learning disabilities and the need for current research on concept mapping we decided to conduct a study to see if a Dana Wireless personal digital assistant (PDA), with Inspiration concept mapping software could help improve the reading comprehension skills of students with learning disabilities.  The Dana Wireless is a PDA device, which functions on the Palm OS platform, with an attached keyboard for word processing. 

A multiple-baseline study was conducted across three high school students with learning disabilities. With a multiple-baseline design, intervention effects are demonstrated by introducing the intervention to different baselines at different points in time.  If each baseline changes when the intervention is introduced, the effects can be attributed to the intervention rather than to extraneous events.

The independent variable for the study was Inspiration concept-mapping software that was downloaded to the Dana Wireless device.  The dependent variable for this study was reading comprehension probes administered once a week by the special education teacher. Students were given a reading passage from the general education social studies textbook once a week during their resource period.  After reading the passage, students completed a concept map on the Dana Wireless.  After reviewing their concept map, the students put away their maps and completed a curriculum-based test on the reading.

Visual inspection of the data demonstrates that when students used the Dana with concept mapping software, they demonstrated moderate improvement in their reading comprehension and increased consistency in their performance.  In addition to using the Dana for this study, the students also began taking the device to other classrooms and using it for other content courses.

The results from this study demonstrate how technology and strategic instruction can be used together to improve reading comprehension skills for students with learning disabilities. In addition, using technology to enhance student use of strategies for learning might improve their academic performance across other content areas that are largely dependent upon a student’s ability to comprehend textbook information.

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