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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Background Young people with intellectual disability (ID) are becoming frequent Internet users, but they present difficulties selecting reliable Internet sources. Methods The present authors tested an instructional programme aimed at increasing skills to evaluate information from the Internet of 33 young adult students with intellectual disability enrolled in special needs education (19.4 years). The programme was composed of different web pages that provided conflicting views on a controversial topic. Students participated in small group discussions supported with Wh‐question graphic organizers and contrasting cases during seven sessions. Results Differences between pre‐ and post‐tests indicated that the programme is effective in increasing students’ ability to select trustworthy web pages, and to use source characteristics to justify such selection by means of supervised instruction. Conclusion Promoting Internet use in a safe way might increase the opportunities of young people with intellectual disability to make choices and self‐determined decisions about their life (Handbook of research‐based practices for educating students with intellectual disability, 2016, New York, NY: Taylor & Francis).

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Informational video blogs are a popular method of communication among students that may be fruitful educational tools, but their potential benefits and risks remain unclear. Streaming videos created by YouTubers are often consumed for entertainment, which may lead students to develop habits that hinder in-depth information processing. We aimed to test this hypothesis by comparing students’ perceived attention to task, metacognitive calibration of their level of comprehension, and comprehension outcomes between reading text blogs and watching video blogs. We also examined the influence of notetaking. 188 lower secondary students read two text blog entries and watched two video blog entries, and completed a series of tasks. Results showed no statistically significant effect of blog format and notetaking on students’ perceived on-task attention, metacognitive calibration, and comprehension of blog entries. Nevertheless, we found a triple interaction effect of format, notetaking, and students’ reading comprehension on blog entry comprehension. Only students low in reading comprehension benefited from notetaking and only when they read the text blog entries. These results indicate that video blogs can be as suitable for learning as text blogs and that notetaking can help struggling readers overcome their difficulties when learning from text blogs but not from video blogs.