The comprehension of expository text is more difficult for virtually all students. Most classroom instruction does not provide enough guidance for students with learning disabilities to be successful with expository text. Early studies of strategy training focused on teaching one strategy at a time. Moreover, while these single-strategy interventions have been effective in improving performance, there is little evidence that strategy use is maintained over time or transferred to other situations. Later interventions involved a combination of strategies.
Several studies have combined summarization and self-monitoring.
These studies, while promising, have not yielded strong maintenance or transfer effects. They have, however, demonstrated that the teacher must play a substantial role in guiding students step by step through the instructional procedures. Some studies have included several instructional strategies. The first pass involved students becoming familiar with main ideas and organization. The next pass included getting specific information from the text by reading questions at the end of each chapter and guessing at the answer, then reading the text to find the correct answers to the questions, and finally self-testing by answering each question with the newly acquired information.