Despite a Low IQ, Can Students Still Learn to Read?

Hi group members,

During the years that I was teaching adult students with intellectual disabilities, I had students range from non-readers through fifth grade level readers.  Although functional and independent living skills were the instructional priorities, I found that all my students wanted to learn to read, and later, wanted to improve their ability to read.  With each new word, they experienced happiness.

A new study has found that with persistence and specialized instruction, students with mild to moderate intellectual disability can read at a first-grade level or better. This means they can go grocery shopping with a shopping list, read the labels on boxes and cans and read basic instructions,  Even minimal reading skills can lead to a more independent life and improved job opportunities.

We know that IQ does not predict a child’s ability to read.  Students with intellectual disability or low IQ can achieve meaningful literacy goals,

What about your students?  Is anyone that works with this population 'teaching reading?'

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

 

Comments

I've seen some recent research that does suggest that students with lower levels of intellectual ability can learn to read just as you suggest. If I am recalling correctly, the instructional approach does require extensive support and time. The gains are slow. I can look for that article once I'm back in the office.

I'm curious about your statement that IQ does not predict a child's ability to read. I suppose you mean that IQ may not predict as well as some other variables. Is that the point? We've often used measures of intellectual ability as a predictor of academic achievement. In some cases, the students with a significant discrepancy between their predicted achievement (based on IQ scores) and actual achievement are considered as significant underachievers. 

Daryl
Reading and Writing coordinator

Hi Daryl,

Thanks for your comment and question.  Based on my instructional experience that I shared in the post, I know that IQ definitely has an affect on one's ability to learn to read. For my high school students with Down Syndrome and IQs between 55-69, their ability to read between the 4th to 5th grade levels in a 4-year period is not one that could have easily been predicted.  Your are correct that my instructional approach did require extensive support and time.  Being a "resource room" teacher with a small class allowed me more time to concentrate on recognizing the letters of alphabet, learning the sounds associated with letters of alphabet, word families and word building, sight word vocabulary, and decoding.  It certainly did not happen with all my students, but with these it certainly did.  

To clarify my original comments, despite their IQs and what might have been predicted for their abilities to read, they accomplished so much more.

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

 

 

Hello Rochelle,

 Good teaching certainly makes a big difference! I'm sure your students were lucky to have you teaching them.

 I have a question. We seem to have quite a few low level readers in our adult ed classes. They are the English speaking ones who test on the TABE at 4.0 or less. We are trying to find a good curriculum for this group. They get frustrated in the Pre-GED classes. Has anyone used Read Naturally? We are looking at their One Minute Reader or their Take Aim at Vocabulary.

Can anyone recommend something they are having success with?

Of course, this gets into the chicken or the egg. Disability? Lack of schooling or what came first??

Keep up the great discussions.

Joan

 

 

 

Having worked with lots of people with disabilities, I wonder to what degree context  has been considered in presenting materials to adult learners? That is, to what degree does the materials fit the context of each learner, considering his/her current living situation, family environment, native country experiences, what each one needs to learn most, etc? Would competency Based, Life Skills content appeal, more than primarily GED focused materials, be more effective in holding attention, and improve learning?

Arthur Rubin

2Learn-English.com

Hi Arthur,

I answered your question below in my response to Joan.  Our curriculum covered independent living skills in a functional context.  It emphasized all the daily living skills needed to be successful and lead a good life.  It did not include any GED-related materials.

Please share your experience working with people with disabilities with us by posting a response to this message.

Thanks very much,

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

 

Hi Joan,

Thanks for joining this conversation.  Your comment about "low level readers" is a very pertinent issue in adult education.  I have heard horror stories from families trying to get their adult children with intellectual disabilities into Adult Basic Education programs.  They were either turned down flat or they were  referred to other programs outside the school districts and community colleges.  They were told that since they couldn't "pass the TABE test," they weren't eligible to register for adult education.

One of the reasons my school district started a program specifically for this population is to provide adult programming for those that couldn't get in to Goodwill, Easter Seals, ARC, etc.  We developed a unique curriculum for independent living and functional skills.  Of course, this was quite some time ago, so I don't remember any of the commercially produced products that were used to supplement the curriculum.

Your question is a good one for the field so I will repeat it.  What effective curriculum exists for native speakers who are low-level readers (test on the TABE at 4.0 or less)?   

Please post your responses.  Answers will be helpful to all adult educators.

Thanks,

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

 

Hi,

To follow-up on the earlier post about research-based reading methods for instructing students with lower intellectual abilities, I found the article!

The research appeared in the April 2014 issue of Exceptional Children, pages 287 - 306. 

The article might provide some useful guidance especially for those instructors who are new to literacy instruction or are unfamiliar working with this population of learners. I'll point out a few characteristics of this intervention approach: daily instruction for 40 - 50 minutes, small group size up to four learners, and that the intervention ran from 1 to 4 years. I've pasted the article abstract below:

This longitudinal randomized-control trial investigated the effectiveness of scientifically based reading instruction for students with IQs ranging from 40 to 80, including students with intellectual disability (ID). Students were randomly assigned into treatment (n = 76) and contrast (n = 65) groups. Students in the treatment group received intervention instruction daily in small groups of 1 to 4 for approximately 40 to 50 min for 1 to 4 academic years. On average, students in the treatment group made significantly greater progress than students in the contrast condition on nearly all language and literacy measures. Results demonstrate the ability of students with low IQs, including students with mild to moderate ID, to learn basic reading skills when provided appropriate, comprehensive reading instruction for an extended period of time.

 

Hope this adds to the thoughtful discussion and your program level considerations.

Regards,
Daryl
Reading and Writing moderator

I coordinate an ABE tutoring program that uses volunteer tutors to teach literacy skills.  Our average entrance score on the SORT decoding test is in the 3rd grade range and I would guess most students would score lower on the TABE.  Often at low levels, students get very fixated on reading to decode rather than reading to understand.  

A highly motivated adult student with an intellectual disability can definitely learn with enough repetition and patience.  Even without nearly the required weekly intensity of instruction to really expect significant results, I have one group that has seen significant progress.  

Some observations about them: They focus on what's important to the learner.  I.e.  The learner is connected at church, so they always look at the church bulletin.  Progress has been slow, over the course of years.  The learner is highly motivated and the tutor guards that motivation by only reading material that has a payoff for his student.  I don't use IQ and despise it as a ranking system, but I'd guess the learner's IQ would be around 70.  The learner now decodes at about 5th grade level.  They're reading from the Challenger adult reading series right now, thought they're using it more like a source for stories than as a workbook to be completed.

The series I like the best for focusing on life skills and adult issues that's also a reading text is Voyager published by New Readers Press.  It's great for improving vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.  This text doesn't focus on the decoding skills that so many very beginners need to sink a bunch of time into.  Pushing too hard on the decoding work without ensuring the learner is having positive experiences with text can lead to burnout.  Decoding study will be slow and frustrating usually.  For decoding, I like the Focus on Phonics component of the Laubach Way to Reading series also published by New Readers Press.  I also really like the book All Sorts of Sorts.  It provides excellent kinesthetic practice with basic decoding ideas.  The Language Experience Approach can also be an excellent technique with lower level learners.  Any successful work will involve a lot patience and review.  

 

Josh,

I am interested in hearing more about the ABE tutoring program you have started.  We are trying to start one for our ABE/GEDr  program.  Some questions I have - where do you get your volunteers?  Do you have the tutors come in for regular sessions or just to brush up on what the teachers taught?  It seems reading your statement, that the volunteers are the teachers.  We would like to have the tutors supplement the teaching they have received.  I would appreciate any information that you can lend to me.

 

Hi,

Much of this discussion has focused on reading instruction but a recently published article  gave more specific guidance to general instruction that could improve learners' outcomes. I imagine that most of our participants have interest in additional content or skill domains than just reading. 

The recent article offered a two prong approach to improving instruction. One prong focused on changes to the content and the second prong focused on changes in student performance. 

In considering how to change the content, six suggestions were offered: 

1. controlling the amount of information presented to the student
2. the number of steps to solve a problem
3. proximity of the lesson content to the identified content standard (such as in a common core state standard)
4. the abstractness of the materials (e.g., concrete materials, pictorial representations, language)
5. the complexity of the responses or how the responses are made
6. new learning versus same content over time

Four strategies were offered for changes in the learners' performance:
1. the number of required student responses
2. the depth of knowledge assessed (e.g., level of understanding or application)
3. generalization to familiar but different or novel tasks or contexts.
4. number and type of prompts.

These considerations provide a potentially useful framework for ensuring that our instruction is individualized for the diverse learners in our programs. You might have other dimensions of curricular or instructional adaptation that has proven effective in your program? Please share!

This work was included in an article by Wakeman, Karvonen, and Ahumada which appeared in the Nov/Dec 2013 (Vol 46, No 2, pages 6 - 13, issue of Teaching Exceptional Children. I have not seen a similar topic that focused on only adolescent and adults so we are left to draw on the findings from the younger population of learners. 

Hi Daryl,

Thanks for sharing this resource.  I had a subscription to Teaching Exceptional Children for the 24 years I worked with our adult population.  From the early years, there was a lack of professional resources related to "exceptional" adults.  Even at professional development conferences such as the Council for Exceptional Children, etc., few presentations were offered on this population.  I used articles and studies from Teaching Exceptional Children as a framework for developing programs and curriculum for our adult students;  Fortunately, at present our field has so much more to offer specifically for our adult students with disabilities.

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

 

To follow-up on the strategies identified in the journal article, one is of particular interest.

That is the "number of required student responses." 

Do you intentionally vary the number of and type of responses with the learners?

Particularly for students with disabilities, increasing the number of responses and response rates is viewed as a means to increasing the intensity of the instruction. For example, incorporating rate per minute measures emphasizes student responses and fluency. The response rate of # correct and # incorrect can be used as diagnostic information. In a vocabulary lesson, new words could be presented on flash cards or word list and have the student orally read the words while a peer or volunteer could be marking correct and incorrect. That's a quick 1 minute drill.

Just a thought for working to make our lessons more efficient and similarly provide instructional information about "next steps."

How does incorporating rate measures work with your students? 

Daryl
Reading and Writing Community Moderator

Hi Daryl,

Thanks very much for your important post.  It includes information that teachers need to know.  Whether we focus on adults with LD or intellectual challenges the "intensity" of instruction relates directly to student progress.  Your comments about lesson efficiency, next steps, and incorporating rate measures are so relevant in this discussion.

Have any of our members used the suggested techniques?  Please elaborate on examples for us.

Thanks,

Rochelle Kenyon, SME
 

 

Hi all,

I have seen an interesting increase in retention, comprehension and generalization in our baking class. One advantage in our setting is that learning and content have real examples that one can also touch, manipulate and apply instantly. One of quickest successes  in learning for our students seems to be student teaching and demonstration. Our instructor, when starting something totally new had a pattern of straight instruction in the morning, midmorning , one student demonstrated the process with everybody else actively encouraging, observing and critiquing. In the afternoon or next day, student teaching. Pairing off, with each student taking  turns demonstrating the process to their partner. The comprehension and retention demonstrated after the sessions was much higher than any one of those processes by themselves. We tried the processes individually and none of them worked as well as the whole steps together. Additionally, if a student was demonstrating with a guest(we had lots of k-12 students and folks visiting, including media) the retention and intensity of that student increased even more, it seemed, than their peers who had not done guest demos. It has not stopped amazing me.

Hi Robin,

It is so useful to get your examples of what works well with students in your programs.  

Not only would these practices be effective in career/technical programs, but in adult basic education classes in reading, math, etc., as well.  The principles are the same.  The teaching / learning process is very multi-sensory in nature.  The more senses involved from both the students' and teachers' perspectives, including speaking, hearing, touching, doing, etc., will enhance learning.

Thanks for posting your message.

Does anyone else have examples of best practices?

Rochelle Kenyon, SME