In view of the dramatic increase in the use of television in the classroom, this study examines whether television captioning, technological enhancements to captioning like highlighting key concepts, and the presence or absence of other "advance organizers" in the classroom affect the comprehension and preferences of students with learning disabilities. Four teachers developed 15 lessons plans, each covering a different science topic. The eighth grade science curriculum was used as a guide, and all lessons used a common structure: goal, objectives, key concepts, vocabulary, advance organizer, and cognitive and affective measures. The lessons were presented to 317 students, 68 of which were identified as having special educational needs. Research focused on post-presentation tests in student comprehension and student reaction to the different types of captioning--standard, edited, or highlighted--and to the presence or absence of advance organizers. Data analysis revealed that: (1) neither variable particularly affected the general education students; (2) the comprehension of special education students, however, was adversely affected by the presence of advance organizers and by the use of edited captions; and (3) on the other hand, the overall highest performance came when advanced organizers were combined with highlighted captioning. The responses suggest that: (1) students in general reported a preference for standard captions over the other two types; (2) special education students gave higher ratings for the captioning benefit than did general education students; (3) for special education students there was a significant correlation between how interesting they felt the video was and the presence of an advance organizer; (4) students overall gave higher interest ratings to videos that were preceded by an advance organizer; (5) students typically rated videos without captions more interesting than videos with captions; (6) students rated videos without captions easier to understand than videos with captions. The report concludes that although captioning may still be seen as a valuable adjunct to classroom video, it may not be able to overcome learning fluctuations caused by, among other things, differences in the nature of the advance organizer used. Eleven figures illustrate the data. (Contains 39 references.) (BEW)