Learning Disabled (LD) students often perform poorly on content area learning tasks. One factor typically contributing to this poor performance is their limited reading comprehension. Reading has been found to be pervasive in content area classrooms, particularly in the upper grades (Komoski, 1978). Interactive Semantic Mapping (ISM) is presented as an interactive instructional strategy developed from multiple theoretical bases to aid the comprehension process. ISM involves students in predicting relationships among concepts and using cooperative knowledge sharing to facilitate comprehension of text related concepts. The theoretical rationale, implementation procedures, and an evaluation of the ISM strategy's effectiveness with various LD populations are presented.
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