Special Education Teachers Integrating Reading with Eighth Grade U.S. History Content.

This research replicates an earlier study and extends it by shifting instructional responsibility from researchers to special education teachers, who implemented reading instruction that included multisyllabic word decoding, academic vocabulary, and three comprehension strategies (generating main ideas, comparing and contrasting people and events, and identifying cause and effect relations) with their intact eighth grade history classes, using history text as the reading material. Participants included 73 eighth grade students with disabilities (77 percent with learning disabilities, 72 percent males, and 45 percent English language learners) and four teachers. Compared to students with disabilities in typical special education history classes, students in the treatment outperformed controls on researcher-developed measures of word- and text-level reading comprehension, as well as in the history content that students in both conditions studied. Across reading strategies, implementation of “nearly all lesson components” ranged from 72 percent to 83 percent.