The relationship between reading motivation and reading comprehension in students with learning disabilities: The mediating effects of reading amount and strategy use.
Spark interest first, then teach reading tricks—extra pages alone won’t help learning-disabled middle-schoolers understand text.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hanifi (2026) asked why some middle-schoolers with learning disabilities understand what they read and others don’t.
The team tracked three things: how much students wanted to read, how many pages they actually finished, and which tricks they used to make sense of text.
They tested whether reading more pages or using better tricks would carry the effect of wanting to read into real comprehension scores.
What they found
Kids who read because they liked it used more fix-up tricks and then scored higher on comprehension tests.
Kids who read only for prizes used fewer tricks and ended up with lower scores.
Simply finishing more pages did not help either group; only the tricks mattered.
How this fits with other research
Micai et al. (2021) seems to disagree. Their students with autism kept using the same tricks no matter the reading goal and still scored low. The difference is the group: autism may block flexible trick use, while learning disability does not.
De Weerdt et al. (2013) also looks contrary. They say kids with reading disabilities have poor impulse control with letters. Hanifi shows these same kids can still learn and use reading tricks when they care about the text, so inhibition and strategy are separate levers.
Wang et al. (2026) backs Hanifi. They taught four students with autism a bundle of tricks and saw big jumps in social-text understanding. Both studies say explicit strategy work beats just turning pages.
Why it matters
Stop pushing reading logs that only count pages. Start lessons with choice and high-interest text to spark liking, then teach one trick at a time—summarize, question, predict. Check that students actually use the trick, not just hear about it. This pair of moves lifts comprehension for learning-disabled readers without extra paperwork.
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Join Free →Pick one high-interest short story, model a think-aloud for summarizing, and have the student try the same trick on the next paragraph.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: The present study is one of the first to investigate how intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation influence reading comprehension among students with learning disabilities through the mediating roles of reading amount and strategy use. Although previous research has found consistent evidence for the effects of reading motivation on reading comprehension in students with learning disabilities. AIMS: This study investigates how intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation influence reading comprehension among students with learning disabilities through the mediating roles of reading amount and reading strategies. METHOD: The sample of our study consisted of 154 eighth-grade students with learning disabilities from 150 schools. Data were analyzed using parallel multiple mediation analysis. RESULT: Results showed that intrinsic reading motivation was positively related to both reading amount and reading strategy use, whereas extrinsic reading motivation was negatively associated with strategy use and unrelated to reading amount. Reading comprehension was significantly linked to the use of reading strategies but not directly to intrinsic or extrinsic motivation, nor to reading amount. Intrinsic motivation had an indirect positive effect on reading comprehension via strategy use, while extrinsic motivation indirectly affected comprehension negatively through the same path. However, reading amount did not mediate the relationship between motivation and comprehension CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that interventions designed to improve the reading comprehension of students with learning disabilities may be more effective when they focus on enhancing intrinsic reading motivation and the use of reading strategies.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2026 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2025.105179