CAN SQ3R FACILITATE SECONDARY LEARNING DISABLED STUDENTS’ LITERAL COMPREHENSION OF EXPOSITORY TEST? THREE EXPERIMENTS

Use of a widely endorsed study technique, SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review), was investigated using secondary level students with specific learning disabilities. Results of three experiments indicated that even with direct teacher instruction throughout lessons, SQ3R did not produce a robust effect on literal comprehension, as measured by retelling after reading from expository texts. However, a functional relationship was demonstrated between length of material read and percentages of retelling. When retelling was assessed on an immediate recall task after short passages were read, percentages of retelling were higher than those obtained by students after reading longer passages.