Training reading comprehension in adequate decoders/poor comprehenders: Verbal versus visual strategies

Third through fifth grade adequate decoders who were poor comprehenders were trained for 10 weeks in either the verbally based reciprocal teaching (RT) program (n = 22) or the visually based visualizing/verbalizing (VN) program (n = 23), or they were assigned to an untreated control group (n = 14). Training reading comprehension strategies in small groups enhanced comprehension as the experimental groups made significant gains on II measures, whereas the untreated control group made only 1 significant gain. Between experimental group comparisons (yielding effect sizes > .32) favored the RT group on several measures that depend on explicit, factual material, while the VN group was favored on several visually mediated measures. Regarding which experimental condition was statistically optimal, the RT group made only 1 significantly greater gain than the VN group on answering text-explicit open-ended questions.