Association for Behavior Analysis International

Results from the National Longitudinal Transition Study 1 and 2 indicate that more and more young adults with disabilities are pursuing a postsecondary education after high school. However, young adults with intellectual disabilities continued to be the group that was the least likely to participate in any postsecondary education. As a result, these individuals are not likely to benefit from occupations that offer opportunities for advancement and financial security in this economy (Wagner et al., 2005). One of the factors that lead to the low enrollment of young adults with intellectual disabilities in postsecondary education is their limited academic skills, particularly in the areas of reading and writing. Therefore, educators should prepare learners with intellectual disabilities with the academic skills necessary to succeed in the postsecondary education settings. The symposium will include two experimental studies that focus on teaching academic skills to young adults with intellectual disabilities at the postsecondary level. We will also discuss the implication of our findings.

Reading is one of the most important academic skills because it enhances individuals learning opportunities as well as general well-being. One research-based reading intervention that targets both oral reading fluency and reading comprehension is the Reread-Adapt and Answer-Comprehend (RAAC) intervention. Although effective, we found this intervention required extensive amount of time and resources. As an alternative to the RAAC intervention, we utilized the text-to-speech feature of the iPad as a component of a reading intervention for learners with ID. Three students diagnosed with ID participated in the study. RAAC and iPad + Comprehension monitoring are the two interventions. We scored student oral story retell as a dependent variable. During the RAAC condition, the student first read the story grammar questions. Then the student read passage three times. During the iPad + Comprehension monitoring condition, each student read the story grammar questions. The student then listened to the passage using iPads text-to-speech feature. We used a multiple-baseline across the participants design to first investigate the two interventions on reading comprehension of the participants. Then we compared the effects of the two interventions in the context of an alternating treatment design. We will complete data collection by the end of November, 2013.