RESEARCH BRIEF Comparison of the Relationship Between Words Retained and Intelligence for Three Instructional Strategies Among Students with Below-Average IQ Matthew K. Burns and Christina H. Boice University of Minnesota Abstract. The current study replicated MacQuarrie, Tucker, Burns, and Hartman (2002) with a sample of 20 students who had been identified with a disability and had an IQ score that was between 1 and 3 standard deviations below the normative mean. Each student was taught 27 words from the Esperanto Interna- tional Language with the following conditions: (a) traditional drill in which unknown words were rehearsed until correctly stated three times, (b) three unknown words interspersed among six known words and repeated three times (interspersal), and (c) incremental rehearsal involving the rehearsal of unknown words among nine known words so that each new word was rehearsed nine times. Consistent with the previous study, the condition with the most opportunities to respond led to the best retention. The correlation between IQ and the number of words retained 1 to 2 weeks later for the most effective condition (incremental rehearsal) was .03 and .15 after correcting for range restriction. Moderate corre- lation coefficients between IQ and number of words retained were found for the other two conditions. Implications for research and practice are discussed. Gates (1930) estimated that a child with an average IQ required 35 repetitions to immedi- ately recognize a word; more repetitions were required if the IQ was lower and fewer if it was higher. This recommendation suggested a rela- tionship between intelligence and learning that was moderated by the number of repetitions of the material being taught. Subsequent research also found that the number of opportunities to respond (OTR; Greenwood, Delquadri, & Hall, 1984) affected the relationship between intelli- gence and immediate recognition of previously learned words because the correlation between receptive vocabulary and number of words re- tained was small in the condition that included the highest OTR and moderate among the con- dition with the least OTR (MacQuarrie, Tucker, Burns, & Hartman, 2002). Although word recognition is not a pri- mary outcome per se, it can be an important Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Matthew K. Burns, 341 Education Science Building, 56 E. River Road, Minneapolis, MN 55455; E-mail: burns258@umn.edu Copyright 2009 by the National Association of School Psychologists, ISSN 0279-6015 School Psychology Review, 2009, Volume 38, No. 2, pp. 284 –292 284