Adults with mild intellectual disabilities: can their reading comprehension ability be improved?
Reciprocal teaching gives big, lasting reading gains to adults with mild ID in either individual or small-group formats.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers taught adults with mild intellectual disabilities how to read better. They used four moves: summarize, question, clarify, and predict. The adults practiced these moves on real texts.
Some adults learned one-on-one. Others learned in small groups. The team checked if the new skills stuck weeks later.
What they found
Both groups made big jumps in reading comprehension. The gains stayed strong at follow-up. One-on-one worked no better than small-group.
How this fits with other research
Prahl et al. (2023) later tested a similar idea with younger adults in college. They also saw big gains when they tied the moves to emails and class work. The 2007 study extends down to older adults in day programs.
van Wingerden et al. (2017) looks like a contradiction. They found poor reading scores in kids with mild ID. The gap closes by adulthood once good instruction is given. Age, not ability, explains the clash.
Schertz et al. (2018) used the same direct-instruction spirit with elementary kids. Both papers show large gains, but the kids learned word reading while the adults learned meaning-making.
Why it matters
You can run reciprocal teaching in any adult day or transition program. No need to choose between 1:1 or group; both work. Start with short news or work memos. Have learners summarize aloud, ask a question, clarify one hard word, and predict what comes next. Track correct summaries as your main data point.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Adults with a mild intellectual disability (ID) often show poor decoding and reading comprehension skills. The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of teaching text comprehension strategies to these adults. Specific research goals were to determine (1) the effects of two instruction conditions, i.e. strategy instruction to individuals and strategy instruction in small groups in a reciprocal teaching context; (2) intervention programme effects on specific strategy tests (so-called direct effects), and possible differences between strategies; (3) (long-term) transfer effects of the programme on general reading comprehension ability; and (4) the regression of general text comprehension by the variables of technical reading, IQ, reading comprehension of sentences (RCS), and pretest and posttest scores on the strategies taught. METHODS: In total, 38 adults (age range 20-72 years; mean age of 36 years) with ID participated in the study. IQs ranged from 45 to 69 with a mean IQ of 58. The intervention programme involved 15 weekly lessons of 1 h each, taught during 3 months. Blocks of lessons included each of Brown and Palincsar's strategies of summarizing, questioning, clarifying and predicting, as participants read and studied narrative and expository texts. RESULTS: Results indicated no significant difference between group and individual instruction conditions. Second, direct programme effects - as determined by posttest-pretest contrasts for strategy tests - were substantial, except for the questioning strategy. Third, even more substantial was the transfer effect to general text comprehension. Moreover, the results on this test were well maintained at a follow-up test. Finally, the variance of general reading comprehension ability was best explained by the test of RCS, and only moderately by the strategies trained. CONCLUSION: The presently used intervention programme provides a good starting point for adults with ID to become better readers.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2007 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2006.00921.x