Measuring listening comprehension in adolescents with intellectual disability

Assessment of listening skills in students with intellectual disability is important in evaluating their educational progress and ability to profit from specific forms of instruction. A common method of assessing listening comprehension has been to ask the listener to retell the story or message, yet free recall has been shown to underestimate knowledge in both young children and children with learning disability, and confounds comprehension with ability to retrieve information from memory. The current study investigated three methods of eliciting understanding of a folk tale by adolescents with intellectual disability, namely free recall, verbally prompted recall and visually prompted recall. Comprehension (story gist) was measured using Stein & Glenn's (1979) major story categories. None of the methods proved significantly better in eliciting story understanding; however, comprehension levels were low and inter-subject variability was high. Furthermore all measures correlated significantly with short-term memory measures. This suggests that the difficulty for subjects may have been with encoding the story efficiently, rendering ineffective experimental manipulations, designed to facilitate retrieval. In addition, data from subjects who were able correctly to order picture cards of a story, indicate that even when encoding occurs, verbalization difficulties may mask competence.