Background: The use of "easy-to-read" materials for people with intellectual disabilities has become very widespread but their effectiveness has scarcely been evaluated. In this study, the framework provided by Kintsch's Construction-Integration Model (1988) is used to examine (a) the reading comprehension levels of different passages of Spanish text that have been designed following easy-to-read guidelines (b) the relationships between reading comprehension (literal and inferential) and various linguistic features of these texts.Method: Sixteen students with mild intellectual disability (ID) and low levels of reading skills were asked to read easy-to-read texts and then complete a reading comprehension test. The corpus of texts was composed of a set of forty-eight pieces of news selected from www.noticiasfacil.es, a Spanish digital newspaper that publishes daily journalistic texts following international guidelines for the design of easy-to-read documents (IFLA, Tronbacke, 1997).Results: Participants correctly answered 80% of the comprehension questions, showing significantly higher scores for literal questions than for inferential questions. The analyses of the texts' linguistic features revealed that the number of co-references was the variable that best predicted literal comprehension but, contrarily to what previous literature seemed to indicate, the relationship between the two variables was inverse. In the case of inferential comprehension, the number of sentences was a significant negative predictor; i.e. the higher the sentence density, the lower the ability of these students to find relationships between them. The effects of the rest of linguistic variables, such as word frequency and word length, on comprehension were null. Conclusions:These results provide preliminary empirical support for the use of easy-toread texts but bring into question the validity of some popular design guidelines (e.g. augmenting word frequency) to optimally match texts and reading levels of students with intellectual disability. Two factors are suggested as contributing to the effect of sentence density on inferential comprehension: 1) long texts present higher conceptual density so there are more ideas to store, retrieve and integrate which increases the demand on inferential reasoning and 2) long texts are perceived as difficult which

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This study describes an intelligent tutoring system to improve reading literacy skills called TuinLEC and it presents the results of its application to a group of sixth grade students. TuinLEC adopts the reading literacy theoretical framework of PISA (Program for International Students Assessment, OECD, 2009). TuinLEC includes eight lessons distributed in two phases, one for modeling and guided practice, and the second for independent practice. TuinLEC interacts with every student and it provides help and feedback for the task in a game-like environment. Half of the students were taught with TuinLEC, whereas the other half served as the control group. Children in both groups were paired according to reading comprehension scores. We measured students' reading literacy skills after intervention, which showed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group. Students who were taught with TuinLEC were also given a questionnaire measuring satisfaction, usability, and self-efficacy; TuinLEC scored positively in all these measurements. We discuss how TuinLEC can improve the reading literacy skills of sixth-graders as well as the contribution of intelligent tutoring systems to instructional interventions.

The use of documents to perform tasks is a continuous task demand in the current knowledge‐based society that involves making a series of decisions to self‐regulate the use of text information. Low‐skilled comprehenders have serious problems monitoring and self‐regulating their decisions in these task‐oriented reading situations, which has a negative impact on performance and merits instructional interventions in school settings. Intelligent tutoring systems have emerged as effective tools to teach strategic skills. Herein, we present TuinLECweb, an intelligent tutoring system that teaches monitoring and self‐regulation strategies to young adolescents. Study 1 explores whether high‐skilled and low‐skilled comprehenders respond to the intervention with TuinLECweb differently in terms of task‐oriented reading performance and monitoring accuracy of nonsearch decisions. The results show that the intervention with TuinLECweb primarily benefits low‐skilled comprehenders. Study 2 compares the efficacy of TuinLECweb over a classroom intervention for low‐skilled comprehenders. The results reveal that TuinLECweb training improves monitoring accuracy of nonsearch decisions over and above classroom instruction. Both studies also reveal that low‐skilled comprehenders use the strategies learned beyond the time of training. Our results provide arguments in favour of using computer‐assisted programs in strategy instruction.

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