Developing Reading Comprehension Among Students With Mild Intellectual Disabilities: An Intervention Study

Abstract

The present study demonstrated that students with mild intellectual disabilities are capable of constructing meaning from written text by guided social interaction. Participants were 40 adolescents in special schools divided into two intervention conditions: reciprocal teaching (RT) and inference teaching (IT). In RT the students practiced four active strategies, whereas IT involved practice in answering inference questions. The training included 16 sessions over eight weeks. Pre- and post-testing included five reading-related tests. The interaction in the small instructional groups was video-recorded. Improvement of test results was obtained in both conditions to about the same extent indicating that both interventions were beneficial. Analyses of the video-recordings demonstrated higher frequency of spontaneous reflections and generation of questions among students involved in RT.

Keywords:

• reading
• intellectual disabilities
• reciprocal teaching
• inference teaching

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ingvar Lundberg

Ingvar Lundberg, Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg

Monica Reichenberg

Monica Reichenberg, Department of Education, University of Gothenburg.