The effects of four types of prompting conditions on the narrative productions of seventh- and eighth-grade students with learning disabilities (LD) and without learning disabilities (NLD) were investigated. Participants were asked to write four stories for which a beginning, middle, end, or no prompt was given in a randomly assigned order. Results indicated differences between LD and NLD groups in both quantity and quality of story production across prompts. A significant group-by-prompt interaction supported the experimental hypothesis. The difference between the quality of LD and NLD stories was significantly greater following the middle-prompt condition; that is, the LD group scored significantly lower when offered the middle prompt than under the other prompting conditions. The results are interpreted as supporting the theoretical position that students with LD reveal relatively greater propensity for linear-sequential processing. Hence, the quality of their writing performance on tasks requiring recursive processing is lower than that of NLD students.
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