The effect of using a tablet and a meta-cognitive strategy to improve reading comprehension skills for students with SLD

• Main Author: Alqahtani, Saeed Saad S.
• Other Authors: Hosp, John L.
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of Iowa 2016
• Subjects: publicabstract; iPad; Learning Disabilities; Metacognitive strategy; Reading comprehension; Special Education; Teacher Education and Professional Development
• Online Access: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/3038; https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6382&context=etd

Students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) have difficulty with most reading skills, including reading comprehension (Hulme & Snowling, 2011). Improving reading comprehension skills requires efficient interventions that consider both meaning- and code-based skills simultaneously. Using a single-subject multiple-baseline design across participants, with alternating treatment design, this study compared two reading interventions (repeated reading vs. tablet text-to-speech) combined with a meta-cognitive strategy (question generation). Three fourth-grade and third-grade students who had been diagnosed by their school as having reading difficulties (reading one to two grades behind their expected reading levels) participated in the study. Using the index of narrative complexity (Labov, 1973; Petersen, Gillam, & Gillam, 2008) as a major dependent variable, two participants showed improvement in reading comprehension skills as measured by visual analysis and the effect size between means. However, there were slight differences for the RAAC intervention over the tablet intervention for one participant. The time required to administer the tablet intervention was shorter than the time required to administer the RAAC intervention (an average of 12.73 minutes for the RAAC vs. 5.45 minutes for the tablet), which is an important consideration when deciding to use an intervention.