Metacognitive Reading Strategy and Emerging Reading Comprehension in Students With Intellectual Disabilities

Abstract

This article ventures to address the gap in special education practices by providing a metacognitive reading strategy to support the emerging reading comprehension skills of kindergarten students with intellectual disabilities. Historically, students with intellectual disabilities have low reading comprehension skills that can impede their overall academic success. There is a gap in practice regarding the identification and effective use of evidence-based reading comprehension instructional strategies for students with intellectual disabilities. Guided by Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s constructivist theories, the purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of a metacognitive reading strategy on the emerging reading comprehension (ERC) skills of kindergarten students with intellectual disabilities. A single-participant, multiple baseline design with graphical visual analysis was used across four kindergarten students with intellectual disabilities to illustrate the influence of the reading intervention. All four kindergarten students showed increases in their ERC skills after the completion of the intervention. An effect-size statistic was calculated to measure the improvement in percentage rate of correct responses between each participant’s baseline and intervention phase. The effect-size results indicated a 60% to 80% improvement rate difference. Therefore, for these kindergartners, the metacognitive reading strategy significantly increased the ERC skills of the participants. The implications for social change include providing teachers with effective metacognitive instructional strategies for ERC skills and for improving ERC skills among students with intellectual disabilities, thus allowing intellectual disability students greater opportunity to benefit from curriculum and instruction over time.