Action Research: Improving Reading Comprehension of Students with Learning Disabilities

Many students with learning disabilities (LDs) find reading comprehension hard, and this can affect their success in school. This guide explains how teachers can use action research to find, try out, and evaluate ways to help these students understand what they read. It covers what LDs and reading comprehension are, why action research fits these learners, which strategies and accommodations can help, and what challenges to expect.

On this page 8 sections

What are learning disabilities?

Learning disabilities are neurological disorders. They affect how a person receives, processes, stores, retrieves, or expresses information. They can get in the way of language skills such as listening, speaking, reading, writing, and reasoning. This can affect a student’s grades, social life, and emotional well-being.

Some key facts to remember:

• LDs are not necessarily related to intelligence or socioeconomic class.
• LDs are not caused by visual, hearing, or motor disabilities.
• LDs are not the result of emotional disturbance or environmental disadvantage.

Because of this, students with LDs need specialized instruction and accommodations to reach their full potential.

What is reading comprehension?

Reading comprehension is understanding what you read: interpreting its meaning and connecting ideas. It draws on several cognitive, linguistic, social, and emotional processes, including:

• phonemic awareness and phonics
• vocabulary, syntax, and semantics
• inference and prediction
• monitoring and evaluating one’s own understanding

Many factors can affect comprehension, such as motivation, attention, memory, language proficiency, cultural background, and how difficult the text is.

Why action research helps students with learning disabilities

Action research is a collaborative, cyclical process of continuous improvement. The cycle has these steps:

1. Identify a problem or question.
2. Design a plan of action.
3. Implement strategies.
4. Collect and analyze data.
5. Reflect on the findings.
6. Modify your practice, then repeat the cycle.

Action research puts learners’ needs first, uses several sources of data, and depends on ongoing feedback and reflection. It is closely tied to the teacher’s own classroom, so teachers and students take an active role in solving real teaching and learning problems.

This makes it a good fit for students with LDs, who need differentiated, individualized, and evidence-based instruction. Through action research, teachers can find out which strategies, accommodations, and interventions actually improve their students’ reading comprehension, and they can refine their teaching in a systematic way.

Instructional strategies to try

These teaching strategies can improve reading comprehension for students with LDs:

Strategy	What it involves
Explicit instruction	Breaking complex skills into manageable steps, modeling each step, then giving guided and independent practice.
Graphic organizers	Visual tools such as story maps, concept maps, and Venn diagrams that help students organize information, connect concepts, and check their understanding.
Phonics instruction	Teaching letter-sound correspondences and decoding, so students can recognize unfamiliar words and understand text better.
Vocabulary instruction	Direct teaching, context clues, repeated exposure, and semantic maps that give students the background knowledge they need to interpret a text.
Collaborative learning	Grouping students to work on a shared task, which builds critical thinking, problem-solving, peer support, and interpersonal skills. Groups can be tailored to different learning styles and preferences.

Accommodations and interventions

These supports can also help students with LDs understand what they read:

• Pre-teaching: Introduce new vocabulary, concepts, or background knowledge before reading. This helps students access the text, raises motivation and interest, and reduces anxiety and frustration.
• Peer tutoring: Pair students so that one teaches the other. The learner gets personal attention, prompts, and feedback, and both gain social interaction and self-confidence.
• Audiobooks: Give students another way to access text. Audiobooks help them work around reading difficulties, reinforce comprehension, and build independence.
• Text-to-speech technology: Software reads written text aloud in a synthesized voice, helping students access and process the text.
• Response to Intervention (RTI): A tiered approach to academic and behavioral support. RTI uses screening, progress monitoring, and evidence-based interventions so teachers can spot and address reading comprehension problems early.

Challenges and limitations

Action research takes time. It requires collaboration, planning, implementation, data collection, analysis, and reflection. Research on reading comprehension for students with LDs has some added challenges:

1. Diverse learners: Students with LDs differ widely from one another, so it is hard to find strategies, accommodations, or interventions that work for every student.
2. Generalizability: The students in one study may not represent the variety of other students with LDs in the same classroom, school, or district, so findings may not apply everywhere.
3. Time constraints: Teachers and students may lack the time and resources to fully carry out and evaluate interventions, given other demands during the school year.

Planning for these challenges from the start makes your study more useful.

Key takeaway

Action research gives teachers a practical, evidence-based way to improve reading comprehension among students with learning disabilities. By choosing effective strategies and accommodations, gathering data, and reflecting on results, teachers can keep improving their practice and support their students’ academic success and well-being.

Frequently asked questions