Audio Books on CD or Tape

Aarnoutse, C. A. J., van den Bos, K. P., & Brand-Gruwel, S. (1998). Effects of listening comprehension training on listening and reading. Journal of Special Education, 32(2), 115-126.

Presents a study which focused on the effects of providing text strategy instruction in a listening mode on listening and reading comprehension. Characteristics of the students examined; Information on the experimental program employed in this study; Details on significant programs effects revealed in this study.

Boyle, E. A., Rosenberg, M. S., Connelly, V. J., Washburn, S. G., Brinckerhoff, L. C., & Banerjee, M. (2003). Effects of audio texts on the acquisition of secondary-level content by students with mild disabilities. Learning Disability Quarterly, 26(3), 203-214.

This quantitative research study investigated the impact of CD-ROM DAISY audio textbooks with advanced navigational capabilities on the learning of students with mild disabilities in grades 9–12. Students who used the audio books out-performed peers reading traditional textbooks on a post-test of content learning.

John, D., & Boucouvalas, A. (2002). User performance with audio: The effect of subjects' cognitive styles. Educational Psychology, 22(2), 133-147.

This work is concerned with the issue of user performance with audio interfaces. We examine how people perform when assigned with simple purely audio tasks. We define 'user performance' as the ratio of correct score divided by the time to complete the task. A test was devised to examine how the user cognitive style classification is related to user performance when dealing with audio tasks. Performance was significantly different between all tasks except for two cases. Subjects performed best where the level of cognitive demands placed on them were low and prefer tasks that use 'Speech', rather than 'Non-Speech'. Cognitive style was not found to be a significant factor influencing performance where all subjects performed well, but subjects' Verbal-Imagery classification was found to be a significant factor for the more complex tasks.

Torgesen, J. K., Dahlem, W. E., & Greenstein, J. (1987). Using verbatim text recordings to enhance reading comprehension in learning disabled adolescents. Learning Disabilities Focus, 3(1), 30-38.

This research study compared the reading comprehension of students with learning disabilities reading printed texts with or without verbatim audio recordings. Reading comprehension was greater for students using the audio recordings.