The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of two ways of making text more explicit for learning disabled (LD) children. One way of making a story more explicit is to add supportive information to it; a second way is to ask inference questions at the ends of episodes to guide the children in orally making similar elaborations of the text. The results indicate that the addition of elaborative content enhanced story understanding when a rating of story understanding and questions were used as the dependent measures. Adding elaborative content had no effect on story retelling, silent reading rate, and ratings of story Interest. The questioning procedure is no more effective for LD students than having them read an explicit version of the text. In a post hoc study, the effects of the conditions on the LD children were compared with the effects on a group of younger normal children. The LD subjects scored lower than the normal subjects on nearly every measure, but the effects of the conditions differed little for the two groups.
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