The purposes of this study were to review the major principles of direct instruction for special students and to analyze the results of recent research on direct instruction for students with learning disabilities and/or under-achievements. To achieve these purposes, some important principles of direct instruction were suggested especially on the prompt procedure to guide students to experience success or mastery level of the contents and how to teach concepts and rules. To examine the effects of direct instruction, the researcher collected and compared the thirteen studies on direct instruction for students with learning disabilities and/or under-achievements implemented in Korea since 1980. As the results, all studies showed positive effects. The effect size (ES) ranges are between 1.14 and 6.75. The seven studies hiring learning strategies into the contents while giving direct instruction reported the most effectiveness (ES=6.75) among the approaches. In discussion, the various differences on the effectiveness of the direct instruction approaches were analyzed and some possible conclusion also were suggested.
Key words : Direct instruction, Learning disabilities, Under-achievements, Effect size The Gongju National University of Education