Evaluation of performance in reading and writing of students with intellectual disabilities exposed to an informatized teaching program

Abstract

Reading and writing are the most basic and essential skills for a student to remain in school. Considering that individuals with intellectual disabilities show cognitive impairments, it is of fundamentally important to create conditions that facilitate teaching and promote the learning of these skills for these individuals. Learning to read and write essentially requires learning simple discrimination (between auditory stimulus and visual stimulus) and relational discrimination (between sounds and text) and along cumulative exposure to these relations. Considering these requisites, a group of researchers developed a teaching program for individualized application which has been successfully used for teaching such skills to different populations. The aim of this study is to evaluate the writing and reading performances of students with intellectual disabilities exposed to this program, seeking to relate their entry skills (requisites) to their performance during the different steps of the procedure. After an initial assessment of targeted skills, three participants will be exposed to individual teaching sessions, interspersed with periodic assessments of progress. The teaching program teaches 60 words, organized in sets of threes (distributed in 20 steps or lessons). In addition to the performance measures provided (corrects and errors rates) it will be assessed also the pace of learning, the progress made for each set of 10 teaching sessions, the amount of exposure to needed to meet the learning criterion in each step and the amount of taught words and new words read after 60 teaching sessions (three times more than the minimum set of 20 steps). Analysis of difficulties shown by the participants should provide subsidies for a review in teaching reprogramming in order to adjust the program to the needs of individuals with intellectual deficits.