Differentiating reading intervention to support levels of comprehension with students with intellectual disabilities

Abstract

National reading data indicate that students with intellectual disabilities (ID) fall behind their peers in reading. Reading is important for academic achievement and learning to read can increase independence in several settings including school, work, home, and community or social (Wilson and Hunter, 2010). Students with ID have historically received vocabulary instruction with less emphasis on the other components of reading, including reading comprehension. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of three interventions on reading comprehension with three participants with ID. The participants in this study were high school students between the ages of 15-18 years. The interventions are grounded in the Construction-Integration Model (Kintsch, 1991; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983), which included three different levels of text representation (i.e., linguistic, text base, and mental representation of text). Given that students with ID have shown variation in skill development, a brief experimental analysis (BEA) was used to identify the most effective intervention for each participant. Then extended analysis was used to further evaluate the effect of the selected interventions by measuring their performance on a researcher-modified Maze. Pre- and post-data was collected on three measures that aligned with each intervention. In the BEA, the participants' reading comprehension scores on the Maze exceeded baseline after receiving the linguistic intervention, anaphor resolution (Dommes et al., 1984). The selected intervention resulted in varying effect sizes on reading comprehension, but the participants demonstrated increased performance on intervention-specific measures. They did not maintain their positive trends in the maintenance phase.