This study assessed whether associative imagery-instructional gains experienced by students with learning disabilities are equivalent in magnitude to those experienced by average-achieving students. Learning disabled and average-achieving students (11- to 13-year-olds) studied paired associates. They were instructed either to construct images depicting the paired items in interaction or to rehearse the pairings. Half of the pairs were easy to relate using interactive imagery, the other half were difficult to mediate with imagery. Half were presented at a 5-sec rate, the other half at a 10-sec rate. Regardless of item type or presentation rate, both learning disabled and average-achieving students benefited from imagery instructions, with great similarity in the between-condition differences for the two populations of students.
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