Despite the importance of reading comprehension, many secondary students with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) struggle with this skill. Students with ID also experience greater challenges in foundational literacy skills (i.e., skills related to phonological awareness) and the cognitive skills temporal processing and nonverbal reasoning (Van…

Modified books are frequently used as comprehension supports for students with extensive support needs (ESN), despite limited evaluations of their creation process or impact on comprehension. This study evaluates the impact of individualized book and comprehension question modifications made through a systematic decision-making process on student…

The rapid growth of inclusive higher education opportunities for young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) has contributed to improvements in students' academics, employment, social, and independent living outcomes. However, many college programs lack a focus on functional literacy, a critical skill for success in…

This practitioner article provides practitioners with instructional techniques to support reading and language comprehension development for children who demonstrate slower growth, including those with autism and concurrent intellectual disability.

Both reading and language skills are necessary for children to see success in academic and everyday life settings. This manuscript describes in detail four key instructional techniques used to target reading and language development in struggling and early readers, including children with both autism and cognitive disabilities. The techniques…

A systematic literature review was conducted to determine the effects of reading comprehension instruction beyond vocabulary instruction for students with intellectual disabilities. Database and ancestral searches from 2000 to 2018 were conducted to identify experimental and quasi-experimental studies that were published in peer-reviewed journals.…

Independent access to text is important to employment and critical for postsecondary success; however, literacy deficits make access to text challenging for individuals with intellectual disabilities. Limited access to employment policies and procedures leaves individuals at a disadvantage. This study examines the text comprehension of employee…

This study aims to describe the phonological awareness, reading comprehension, fluent reading levels and types of errors in the reading of individuals with DS who can read and to examine the relationship between these variables. This relational descriptive study consists of 44 individuals with DS aged between 7 and 30 years who can read. 'Early…

Background: The Internet provides individuals with intellectual disability with access to information and participation in a broader society, but it also presents risks when content is difficult to comprehend. This study aimed to test whether students with intellectual disability enhanced their comprehension of online blogs as a function of the…

This study examined the effectiveness of a Derived Relational Responding (DRR) program in improving reading comprehension accuracy among upper elementary students without intellectual or developmental disabilities who struggle to meet grade-level reading standards. Addressing a gap in current interventions, the study investigated whether DRR,…

This study asked Teachers of the Visually Impaired to evaluate a shared reading intervention for Students with Intellectual Disabilities and Visual Impairments and how they felt about their preparedness to teach reading. There has been little research on the student population's literacy skills acquisition. For this study, TVIs evaluated stories…

The purpose of the current study was to determine the extent to which practicing keywords increased word recognition, reading fluency and comprehension for students with intellectual disability (ID). The dependent measures included word recognition (i.e., the percentage of previously unknown keywords read correctly in the given text), reading…

This study evaluated how students enrolled in a comprehensive post-secondary transition program learned how to use text-to-speech (TTS) software to read higher-level written text. Using a pre- and post-test research design, researchers examined whether direct instruction effectively taught students to use a TTS program. We used third and…

Little is known about the content and quality of reading instruction provided to students with intellectual disability. This study aimed to describe the reading instruction provided to students with intellectual disability who were not yet readers in self-contained elementary classrooms. The teachers of 24 classrooms participated in the study.…

This study examined the response of two students in the Southwestern United States with autism spectrum disorder and IQ in the intellectual disability range to a comprehensive, text-based reading intervention. The intervention, "Friends on the Block," includes multiple strands of literacy providing explicit instruction in phonics,…