Intellectual disability is a significant limitation in the intellectual function and adaptive behavior of a person that appears before the age of 18 years. One of the adaptive behaviors is conceptual skill, which includes functional reading. For students with mild intellectual disabilities, the main purpose of functional reading is to get beneficial information for their daily lives. This skill is also important for self-adjustment and to live independently in their environment. The intervention to strengthen this skill is paraphrasing strategies that consist of three steps: reading, asking, and putting (RAP) the information in their own words. This strategy has been proven to improve reading comprehension in high school students with mild intellectual disabilities (Hua, Woods-Groves, Ford, & Nobles, 2014; Feeney, 2012), but the implementation of this strategy on students with mild intellectual disabilities in junior high school is yet to be examined. Through this single subject experimental study, the researcher aims to see whether the RAP strategy is effective in improving functional reading comprehension for a student with a mild intellectual disability. The research was conducted in three stages: preparation, implementation, and data analysis. In the implementation stage, techniques for teaching the RAP strategy to the participant referred to the direct instruction stage. The results showed an improvement in the participant's functional reading comprehension before and after the intervention program. The participant was also able to maintain functional reading ability without guidance from the researcher.
Students with borderline intellectual functioning (BIF) have below average cognitive abilities but are above the classification for intellectual disability. Generally, these students have low academic skills such as difficulties in comprehending reading material. Using a single-case study design, this study examined the effectiveness of summarization techniques on improving the reading comprehension skills of a student with BIF. More specifically, this study focused on improving the student's comprehension of expository texts by targeting inference comprehension when reading. This study was focused on one 12-year-old male BIF student who has difficulties reading. There were three stages in this study: pre-test, intervention, and post-test; for which the intervention stage employed a direct instruction technique whereby the participant was given texts and trained to summarize each paragraph while reading the passage. The participant was also provided with a visual organizer and a guidance card to support self-regulation while reading. Three measurements were used to assess the success of the intervention; a reading comprehension test, an oral retelling measurement, and a session effectiveness evaluation. The two post-tests were administered one day and one week after the intervention stage. The participant had 23.8% correct answers in the pre-test; however, he achieved 71.4% and 78.6% correct answers in the first and second post-tests and also had oral retelling improvements. During the pre-test, the participant's oral retelling score was 4/30, which increases in the first and second post-test to 18/30 and 23/30. In addition, the participant improved by the end of almost all sessions. Therefore, it was concluded that summarization techniques can be effective in improving student abilities in understanding expository texts. This study presented a strategy that could be employed by practitioners and teachers to improve reading comprehension skills in students with BIF. This study also outlines several factors that should be considered when developing summarization strategy interventions for BIF students.
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