Teaching early reading skills to children with severe intellectual disabilities using Headsprout Early Reading

Abstract

Background Beginning reading skills are often taught using phonics. Research has demonstrated the effectiveness of phonics with typically developing students, but less research has evaluated this method with students with intellectual disabilities. Method This paper evaluated the computerized phonics‐based intervention Headsprout Early Reading® with eight students aged 7–19 years with severe intellectual disability. Six children were verbal, two were non‐verbal. Four students completed Headsprout as it was designed for typically developing children, and four students accessed two adapted version of the intervention. Additional table‐top teaching was used to support the intervention for some participants. Results Verbal students improved in initial sound fluency, nonsense word reading, and word recognition, but did not show improvements in phonemic segmentation, regardless of whether or not they accessed the original or adapted intervention. Conclusions The findings suggest that Headsprout Early Reading can be used to support the development of reading skills for students with intellectual disability.

Teaching early reading skills to non‐vocal students with severe learning disabilities using Headsprout Early Reading©

“…Staffing levels have also been a prominent feasibility issue in previous studies investigating using HER© with children with disabilities. Herring et al (2019) reported that the two non-vocal children in their study did not receive the recommended three sessions per week due to staff availability, resulting in the children only engaging in between 1.28 and 1.31 episodes a week. Issues surrounding staff availability and the amount of time teachers had to allocate to the intervention were also highlighted by Tyler et al (2015b), while Huffstetter et al (2010) stated that teaching staff would only continue delivering the programme in the future if more staff were available and allocated to support programme delivery.…”

“…For example, students could complete three different online episodes in a week if they reached the mastery criterion each time. The mastery criterion in this study, however, was set at 80% correct responses throughout the episode rather than 90% (see, for example, Grindle et al, 2013Grindle et al, , 2021Herring et al, 2019). This was considered to be a more realistic achievement goal for students and not likely to impact on the main objective of students being able to progress through the episodes.…”

“…Another study evaluating HER© with students with SLD also described the learning trajectory of two students who were non-vocal (Herring et al, 2019). In this study teachers and teaching assistants were trained by the researchers to support the students throughout the online episodes.…”

“…In total, the students engaged in between 13 and 18 weeks of intervention, in addition to their regular classroom teaching for reading, receiving between 17 and 38 sessions of HER© (Herring et al, 2019). On standardized tests of early reading skills the verbal students improved their initial sound fluency (being able to identify initial sounds in words), nonsense word fluency (being able to sound out and read nonsense words; for example, vab, wof) and word recognition (being able to select a spoken target word from an array of five words).…”

“…As only two non-vocal students were recruited to access HER© without speaking activities, further research is warranted with more non-vocal children. Further, it is worth noting that neither of the two non-vocal students in the Herring et al (2019) study received the HER© intervention to fidelity. Although it had been recommended that students receive a minimum of three sessions per week, the average number of sessions per week that the two students received over the course of the intervention was 1.28 and 1.31 sessions a week.…”