Helping High-Functioning Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder Overcome Their Reading Problems: a Randomized Field Study

Background: Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have a tendency to learn by rote without necessarily making sense of what they learn (Rutter, 1985), something that can notably be observed in their patterns of reading ability. Indeed, ASD students often show evidence of atypical profiles of reading ability. These students seem to present age appropriate or higher word recognition abilities and little or no comprehension (e.g., Whitehouse & Harris, 1984). Although there is now evidence that some students with ASD seem to demonstrate close to or age appropriate reading comprehension abilities, more than half of theses students show important reading difficulties. Further, there seems to be a positive relationship between these students comprehension ability and their oral vocabulary (Nation et al., 2006). Objectives: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a highly structured small group reading comprehension instruction, which combines vocabulary and main idea identification instruction specifically designed for ASD students. Methods: 43 ASD students (7-11 years old) with end of first-grade or better word recognition ability participated in the study. Small groups (3 or 4 students) were paired on pre-test measures then randomly assigned to either an intervention condition or to a control condition. The control group received regular instruction only. The students participating in the intervention condition received 24 hours of reading comprehension instruction. They received instruction three times a week (30 minutes per session) for a period of 16 weeks. The intervention combined decoding of multi-syllabic words, word meaning (vocabulary), reading of connected text, main idea identification (Carnine et al., 2004) and story structure (Williams et al., 2001) instruction. Results: The results show statistically significant effects on researcher-developed measures of instructed vocabulary F(1, 42) = 6.59, p < .05, d =0.8, main idea identification skills F(1, 42) = 7.423, p < .05, d =0.7, and general comprehension skills F(1, 42) = 4.013, p < .05, d =0.6. Conclusions: The present results suggest that intensive and highly structured interventions are efficient to teach word meaning and main idea identification skills to ASD students, as well as general text comprehension. These results have important implications for the development of future effective reading comprehension interventions.