Session Information
04 SES 04 B, Didactics
Paper Session
Contribution
A pilot study was performed with a group of participants of working age. All of them had intellectual disabilities. None of them had access to the labour market. Instead they attended daily activities (DA) at a day centre. The purpose of day centres are to offer meaningful activities, social community and increased participation in the public life. The number of young people who are placed in Swedish DA has dramatically increased. The increase is 174 % since 2002.
A prerequisite for participation is a good reading ability. The participants in this study were able to decode words but they read very slowly. Furthermore they read in a passive and uncritical way. If they are to become active and critical thinking citizens of society, they have to read actively. Reviews of reading instruction delivered to individuals with intellectual disabilities reveal a constant lack of focus on reading for meaning (Katims 2000). These reviews show that most instruction have focused on sight word instruction (Conners 1992; Houston and Torgesen 2004). In the last decadethe sociocultural approach to teaching and instruction of students with intellectual disabilities has become more common (Browder et al 2006; Wishart et al. 2007). Inspired by the work of Vygotsky (1978), it has been suggested that reading comprehension is acquired through an interactive social setting that enables students to negotiate with their peers and teacher to make meaning from the text. While negotiating students are initiated into the cognitive practices and strategies of skilled comprehenders, which are then internalised. The sociocultural paradigm for instruction is thus in conflict with the sight word instruction which is based on behaviourism. The former approach emphasises the strengths and knowledge students with intellectual disabilities bring to the classroom while the latter emphasises the students´ deficits (Trent, Artiles & Englert 1998).
During the eighties a programme for strategy instruction, Reciprocal teaching (RT), was developed for struggling readers (Palincsar & Brown, 1984). RT is a group activity, in which students read a passage of expository text, paragraph by paragraph. During the reading they practice four reading comprehension strategies: generating questions, summarising, attempting to clarify word meanings or confusing text, and predicting what might appear in the next paragraph. Since the introduction of the reciprocal teaching method (Brown and Palincsar 1984) numerous studies have been conducted to examine its efficacy. Most of the studies have been implemented in formal learning settings from elementary school through to college. These studies have revealed improvement in students’ abilities to summarise, generate questions, clarify and predict. Surprisingly little research, if any, has been conducted to extend reciprocal teaching to students with intellectual disabilities. There seems to be an assumption that metacognitive and communicative skills on which joint comprehension activities are involved are less likely to be available to students with intellectual disability (van den Bos et al., 2007; Alfassi, 1998; Alfassi, Weiss & Lifshitz, 2009). The main purpose of this study was to investigate if RT can encourage adults with intellectual disabilities to generate questions, clarify , summarize and predict before, during and after reading a text.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Alfassi, M. (1998). Reading for meaning: The efficacy of reciprocal teaching in fostering reading comprehension in high school students in remedial reading classes. American Educational Research Journal, 35, 309-332. Alfassi, M., Weiss, I., & Lifshitz, H.(2009). The efficacy of reciprocal teaching in fostering the reading literacy of students with intellectual disabilities. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 24, 291-305. Browder, D.M., Wakeman, S.Y., Spooner, F., Ahlgrin-Delzell, L., & Algozinne, B. (2006). Research on reading instruction for individuals with significant cognitive disabilities. Exceptional Children 72:392-404. Conners, F. A. (1992) Reading instruction for students with moderate mental retardation: Review of and analysis of research. American Journal on Mental Retardation 96 , pp. 577-597. Houston, D., & J. Torgesen. 2004. Teaching students with moderate disabilities to read: Insights from research. Tallahassee, FL: Florida Department of Education, Bureau of Instructional Support and Community Services. Katims, D.S. 2001. Literacy assessment of students with mental retardation: An exploratory investigation. Education and Training in Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities 36: 363–72. Palincsar, AM. S., & Brown, A. L. (1984). Reciprocal Teaching of comprehension –fostering and comprehension – monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction. 1, 117–175. Trent, S.C., Artiles, A.J., & Englert, C.S (1998) From deficit thinking to social constructivism:A review of theory, research, and practice in special education. Review of Research in Education, 23,277-307. van den Bos, K.P., Nakken, H., Nicholay, P.G. & van Houten, E.J. (2007). Adults with Mild Intellectual Disabilities: Can their Reading Comprehension Ability be Improved? Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 51 (11), 835-849. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. (M Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Ed. and Trans.). Cambridge: MA Harvard University Press. Wishart, J.S., Willis, D.S., Cebula, K.R., & Pitcairn, T.K. (2007). Collaborative learning: Comparison of outcomes for typically developing children and children with intellectual disabilities. American Journal on Mental Retardation 112-361-374.
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