Evidence for a Literacy Intervention for Students with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Abstract

The importance of helping all children make meaningful progress in reading development is supported by legislative mandates and court rulings. The purpose of this research was to describe findings from a series of single-case design studies completed over three years to test the effects of a specific comprehensive literacy intervention, Friends on the Block, on word recognition. Participants were 18 students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) ranging in age from 6 to 13. Results were analyzed using Tau statistical procedures that indicate consistent moderate-to-strong positive effects across all participants for both sight words and decodable words. Across the 67 sight word studies the mean effect size was 0.73, and across the 8 decodable word studies the mean effect size was 0.74. Further research is needed to examine the impact of the intervention on a broader array of variables. Implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.