Schmitt, A. J., Hale, A. D., McCallum, E., & Mauck, B. (2011). Accommodating remedial readers in the general education setting: Is listening-while-reading sufficient to improve factual and inferential comprehension ? Psychology in the Schools , 48 (1), 37–45. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.20540

The effect of listen-while-reading (LWR) compared to silent reading (SR) on the comprehension of skills of middle school students was examined.

Twenty-five middle school students in a remedial reading program in the southeastern U.S. participated. Students were selected through the Read 180 computer program that identified students who were below grade level. Participants’ reading levels ranged from grade 1 to grade 5.

Reading passages and comprehension questions taken from the Timed Reading Series Plus (Spargo, 1998) were used to measure students’ comprehension skills. Students were given three passages corresponding to their grade level. Conditions were counterbalanced so that all students participated in both the listen-while-reading (LWR) and the silent reading (SR) conditions (one condition per day across two days). The LWR condition included text-to-speech audio that read at 125 words per minute. After either listening to or silently reading each passage, students were asked a series of 10 comprehension questions, for a total of 30 questions. Comprehension was measured by examining a student’s total number of comprehension questions correctly answered, total number of factual comprehension questions correctly answered, and number of inferential comprehension questions correctly answered.

Reading comprehension scores did not improve in the listen-while-reading (LWR) condition compared to the silent reading (SR) condition, even after controlling for overall reading ability.